[Deep Dive]

[Creating an icon: Aligning Objects with Mat Helme]

Illustrator allows us to take two or more objects in the line

or distribute them with just a click of a button.

Let's take a look at the aligning functionality in illustrator

and center our icon in the middle of the canvass.

With our icons file open, let's lock up our layers and hide them.

Then create a new layer labeled objects.

Next, create four separate circles with the ellipse tool

and give them all different colors using the Swatch Panel.

You can easily duplicate them again

by holding the alt key and dragging each shape out.

With all of our circles randomly spread across the screen,

let's make sure we have our aligns panel open as well.

You can do this by going to window, align, or by using the shortcut key shift F7.

Now let's go ahead and hide our Layers panel and our Swatches panel

and just focus on the align panel for now.

By using command minus we'll zoom out of the artboard just a bit.

Let's go ahead and grab all of our objects

by using the shortcut key command A

and align all of these objects to the middle of the artboard.

When doing this, the first thing we want to do

is to make sure we're aligning to artboard

because we have several options when it comes to aligning.

In the align panel, in the top right drop down, select show options

and now we have this option at the bottom right, this is align to.

Now right now, by default it's on align to artboard and that's exactly what we want.

So again, with all of the objects selected and with align to artboard selected,

let's go ahead and align them horizontally to the center.

Now you can see they've kept the same vertical position

but their horizontal position has now aligned to the middle of the artboard.

Now if we want to align it to the left of the artboard,

we can select all of them from the align panel where it says horizontal align left,

we can select it and see all the objects aligned to the left

and the same goes for the right.

Now let's go ahead and spread our objects out again

randomly across the canvas,

select them all again by hitting command A,

and let's align them to the top of the artboard.

We can do that by the vertical align on top

and then to the bottom and to the middle--great.

Now if I want to align them to a specific object, I can do that as well.

Select them all and on the align to drop down, let's align them to a key object.

Right now, it's grabbing this purple circle.

So when we align to the vertical alignment center,

it's going to align all of these objects in the center of this one object

even though it's not aligned to the center of the artboard.

It's just aligning it to the single object.

Now again let's spread this back out.

Select them all on the align to drop down.

Let's align to key object

and select the dark green circle and next work says align to objects.

Let's select horizontal align center

and now you can see all of the circles are aligned to the dark green circle.

Now directly below align objects, we have distribute objects.

Distribute objects distributes the objects equally among the artboard

if the align to artboard is selected.

So by selecting all of the objects and then selecting vertical distribute

it then distributes from their centerpoint across the artboard equally.

And again, if we do a horizontal distribute,

it then distributes them across the artboard equally from their centerpoints.

Now if we want to distribute specific spacing between each object

and this comes in handy if you say laying out a user interface,

say for a menu and you want 40 pixels between each one of the buttons,

and instead of you know measuring it out from the ruler which you can do,

but here's a quicker way.

So select all of the objects, go to align to key object, and then

then let's plug in 40 pixels into the distribute spacing input area

and let's distribute this horizontally at 40 pixels.

Now you can't really tell because they're not all aligned.

So let's align them to the middle of the artboard

and now you can see there's 40 pixels between each object.

If we were to group all of these, they would be treated as one object.

So if wanted to center all of these circles as one group,

we can do that by selecting them all by hitting command A,

grouping them by selecting command G, make sure we're aligning to artboard,

and let's align to the center horizontally and vertically which we're already are.

That's how you align them all to the center. Now let's apply this to the icon.

Let's go ahead and delete our objects layer,

make our icon layer visible, and unlock it.

Select our icon and it's already group together as one object.

Make sure we're aligning to artboard

and let's center it inside of the artboard.

Perfect.