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Align and Distribute Tools

2:53 with Ashley Burke

Adobe Illustrator has many different tools to help you create your designs. Use the align and distribute tools to put your elements where they need to be.

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  • 0:01

    Select all of these.

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    And, if we wanna make sure that the space is distributed

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    evenly, bring up to Window > Align.

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    And bring up these Align tools.

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    These are also available in the Control Panel.

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    If I hit Align right here, that's another way to access this panel, so

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    you could do either one.

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    And we want to vertically distribute this center, I believe.

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    Oop, not that one.

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    So, actually that is correct, but

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    right now what's happening is it's aligning to the art board,

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    and we want it to distribute between the selection, not within the art board.

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    So, I am gonna hit Undo, Edit > Undo Align.

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    So Edit > Undo, anytime you hit Cmd+Z, you are gonna undo what you just did.

  • 0:53

    It's a fabulous, fabulous tool.

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    And let's try that one more time.

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    So we need to set our target rather than to align to the art board,

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    we want it to align to the selection.

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    So, align to selection.

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    And now, we'll do vertically distribute center.

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    Awesome.

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    So, it's distributing between here and not using the artboard as the reference.

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    Next, we need to have a place for our logo.

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    So, our logo is gonna be located up here in our header.

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    And I just need to have a placeholder for that.

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    To do something different, we can use a rounded rectangle.

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    Okay.

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    So I'm gonna click off.

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    Now I want this logo box to be

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    centered within my header.

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    And again we can use these align and distribute tools to help us do that, and

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    it's a little bit different so I'm gonna click my logo box.

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    I'll click the header.

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    These are the two objects I need to have relate to each other.

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    But I want the header to be my target, so I'm gonna click it one more time.

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    I don't have to hold anything,

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    I'm just talking it one more time and

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    I assign that as the target.

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    And now, I'm going to, yeah horizontal align center and

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    then I also need vertical align center.

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    Perfect and it's using the header as the target.

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    So that's a really great handy too.

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    And so you can see what's happening here.

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    It sets align to and this time we have set a target or key object.

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    As opposed to the art border selection.

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