All About the Align Panel in Adobe Illustrator Tutorial

 

INTRODUCTION 

what's going on everybody welcome back to design Smith today I'm going to be showing you all about the Align panel in Adobe Illustrator before we get started if you end up liking this video please remember to hit like And subscribe it really helps me with the growth of my channel and I appreciate it so the first thing we want to do is make sure that our align panel is showing

ALIGN PANEL

 so go up to window and click on align and it'll show up probably over here somewhere I like to put mine on the right side I'm going to be doing a video pretty soon about how to set up your workspace in the best way possible so just keep an eye out for that okay so your align panel does exactly what you think it would do it aligns your objects for you and there's all kinds of different things going on here but I assure you it's very simple

CENTER HORIZONTAL

 so the first thing I'm going to do here is just draw a square right here and what we can do is we've got several options we've got align to artboard align to selection and aligned to key object align to artboard is going to be your default and what you can do is go up here to the center horizontal align Center and you can also align it to the ver vertical Center of your artboard so this is now perfectly centered with the artboard and just like you would expect you could do horizontal align Left Right top and bottom

DISTRIBUTE OBJECTS

 so that covers this first row right here and as you can see it's not as intimidating as you may have thought all right so the next row is distribute objects and this is very helpful if you want to distribute objects evenly so I'm going to draw probably five going across right here and I'm just going to move them I'm going to move some of them out out of the bounds of the art board and just kind of randomly place them anywhere I'm going to move this one let's move this way over here move this over here just kind of scatter them in general 

VERTICAL ALIGN CENTER

now what you can do is select all of these or you can do command Orr a on your keyboard and just make sure that these are selected and nothing outside of these bounds are being selected and you can go up to align objects and vertical align Center and then you can click on horizontal distribute Center so that is going to horizontally distribute your objects evenly and the same thing applies vertically you can do the same thing over here these are not aligned horizontally but they are aligned vertically all right and so for the distribute objects row a couple of these could be a little bit confusing 

TOPMOST ELEMENT 

so I'll try to explain it the best way I can let's go ahead and arrange these like this and what this is going to do if you select all of these and if you go up to distribute objects vertical distribute top this is going to vertically distribute all of these squares right here with respect to the topmost element so that's going to be this one right here now after you do the top if you click on the center it will do the ex EXA same thing so let's undo what we just did and click on the center and that's going to look for the object that is the most in the center

VERTICAL DISTRIBUTE

 so it's this one and it's going to vertically distribute with respect to this square right here and then we can undo that and then go over here to Vertical distribute bottom so that's going to vertically distribute with respect to this bottom square right here I rarely use vertical distribute top bottom and same thing with horizontal left and horizontal right

SELECTION PERSONALLY

 I'm a lot more likely to use vertical distribut Center and horizontal distribute Center and I'll show you what those do let's just kind of move these around like this select everything and click on vertical distribute Center and this is taking into account all of these squares right here and it's Distributing everything with respect to the vertical Center of your selection and then the same thing over here with horizontal this is going to distribute all of our objects in accordance with our selection personally for what I do I use distribute objects the least amount all right in this next one I used more than anything else 

CONTEXTUAL TEXT BAR 

so let's go ahead and draw some more squares let's get this contextual text bar out of the way we'll move these over here we'll just kind of create these randomly and now let's select everything and this is going to be distribute spacing and you have to select one of your objects in order to activate this so we're going to say that we want one inch in between each of our boxes

VALUABLE TOOL 

 so you can go ahead and click on horizontal distribute space and now there's exactly 1 inch in between each one of these objects and you can enter in whatever value you want and you'll notice over here that aign to key object is highlighted when we do this that's because we have this object highlighted as our key object because we selected it after we made our selection if you want you can change your key object and then go over here and increase the spacing a little bit and now it's going to align to this object it's going to keep this object still and push everything else outward this is a very valuable tool 

ARTBOARD VERSUS

when you've got a lot of elements on the p page and you're trying to get some Symmetry and now with all of these selected we can just go up here to align vertical Center and that will align all of these vertically centered and now let's take a look at aligning to the artboard versus aligning to the selection so let's select all of these and let's go over here to align to artboard so we're going to distribute the spacing horizontally and what that's going to do is align all of our objects to the bounds of our artboard and we can do the same thing horizontally

STROKE

 so you can use this if you want to use some Randomness and let's bring this this in really quickly and I'll show you what selection is so this is our selection and now let's click on align to selection and you can distribute spacing to your selection and it will only stay within the bounds of this selection here all right and there's a couple more things that I want to show you so for this example we need to swap the fill in the stroke so let's put like this bright pink stroke on the outside here I'm going to go over here to stroke and a line to stroke I'm going to bring this up to 20 points and now I'm going to create just a little line here with our pin tool I'll bring that down to like one point and then 

COLOR DROP

I'm going to color drop this one so that both of these match each other so what we're going to do here is Select both of these and let's click on this line to make that our key object go over here to a line and check use preview bounds what that's going to do is even though we have a stroke on this element right here it's going to align to this line to the outer edges of this pink so let's do vertical align bottom and as you can see this shape with its stroke is aligned to our line now now we're going to uncheck use preview bounds select both of these click on our line to make that a key object and now align to the bottom and it's aligning to the shape without the stroke 

TEXT BOX

so keep that in mind if anything is acting weird you might have used preview bounds checked or unchecked depending on what you're trying to do okay and the last thing I want to show you is aligning to the text box versus the glyph area so let's select both of these and let's go over here to align to glyph bounds and if you have Point text and area text both selected and you make this box your key object let's align to this right here and if you move this over here you'll see that the uppermost part of the text which is right there where that s is it's aligning to that instead of the text box itself where these bounds are so let's uncheck both of these and this box is still our key object so let's align to the top here 

CONCLUSION 

now it's going to align to that text box in this example right here we'll do an area type and align to this and let's unch Tech area text and that will align with the top of the text instead of the text box well I hope I taught you something in illustrator today thank you so much for watching and if you wouldn't mind please hit like And subscribe it helps me a lot with the YouTube algorithm and I really appreciate it thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next time bye-bye