How to Align Objects & Distribute Evenly in Illustrator (Tutorial)

[Music] let's look at how to align objects in adobe illustrator whether you're trying to line things up to your artboard other objects you're trying to distribute the spacing of them we'll cover all that in the alignment panel here in illustrator okay so first thing we need some objects so i'm going to create just some squares out here we'll create one like that and then i can duplicate them out if i'd like just like so so we have a couple i'm going to move a couple of these to the side for now and we're just going to look at this one square now when you have an object selected there's a bunch of properties in your properties panel alignment panel is one of them although what i like to do is go ahead and go up to window down to a line that's shift f7 and it's going to pull open the alignment panel i drop down the more options in the show options setting here and what i like to do is just keep this docked to the right side of all of my panels because i always like the alignment panel to be open i'll use it all the time so if we look at align two what are we lining to are we lining to a selection no we only have one thing selected so we're gonna align to our artboard and i can do a center line left right and then i can even top bottom and center on the vertical so that's horizontal and vertical centering so that's how you can line up your object to the artboard really quickly now what if we have multiple objects in here well if i bring another one of my squares over the same thing happens when i have both selected if i align to the artboard i can do center i can do left right and then of course these are going to jump on top of each other if i do the vertical so let's move them out i can do the same thing though here i can do vertical top bottom whatever i want to center these things up now what if i want to center it up on itself right so what if i want to align one object to the other object what we can do there is grab both and then click on the object we want to align to that creates a key object so whichever one has the darker outline now everything else you have selected will align itself to that object based on whatever alignment button you click so for instance if we wanted to center this up on this object now that we have it selected as a key object and you can see that by looking at a line two key object we can just center up the horizontal uh centering i guess you should say same thing with vertical you know we can select click make it a key object do the vertical centering just like that now if this object was bigger so we can scale this up and let's say i wanted to center this to like the top line here that's why i do a lot i'll center objects so that they're lined up click on this bigger object it's the key object take this one and center him to the top just like that or even the bottom that's how you know these things are perfectly lined up now what if i want to distribute these objects across my artboard evenly or even just distribute a group if i have a bunch of different shapes and i want to distribute them and make sure there's even spacing between the first way i'd look at is having multiple shapes that are the exact same shape so i can duplicate these out i'm holding option or alt on pc and you might notice that these are not at all spaced the same so if i select all these go to align two and i'm gonna align to the selection first i'll show you that you can distribute these objects both horizontally and vertically so now if i click on this it's gonna distribute the center points which is a very key thing to remember distribute objects distributes on the center point of the object so really this works best when all of your objects are the exact same so the spacing between each of these center points is the exact same now which in turn makes the spacing between each of the objects the same but what happens when we insert an object that's different well if we click this go to that selection and say i want to align to the selection and i want to distribute these evenly look at that the spacing between the objects visually is incorrect it's not evenly distributed the center points they are evenly distributed so how do we get this to work well we want to distribute the spacing not distribute the objects so if i distribute the spacing horizontally that's going to say i want the spacing between each object to be the exact same now if i want to do this to my artboard all i have to do is switch from aligning to the selection to aligning to the artboard can distribute spacing and that's going to space everything out across my artboard one object to the other if i delete an object and want to distribute that spacing again i can just do the same exact task same thing with adding objects so i know i want to have four objects across here i'm going to skinny this one up a little bit so we actually have space i want to have five objects i should say no matter what as long as they're lined up it's going to distribute the spacing between each just like that to the artboard now what if i want to distribute an exact amount of spacing between each object the only way to do that is to tell illustrator where's your starting point and you have to do that with a key object so let's say i want to distribute these squares exactly 10 pixels or i'll show you also 100 pixels away from each other in between i'm going to grab this selection click on the bigger square the starting point and say i want these to distribute every 10 pixels horizontally do that now there's 10 pixels in between each i can then say 100 pixels click the button 100 pixels between each square can do the same thing vertically we just didn't but if we had moved all of these around we can do the exact same thing and things don't have to be lined up so for instance if i just select all of this i can go here and say you know what vertical distribute the spacing and it's going to maybe tweak this so that they go in different directions but if you wanted it to be like a stair step the closer the object is to the next one is how it's going to line it up so if we bring this down close the next one's going to be here we kind of do our stair step already we can select it and then distribute and it's going to basically move the objects to the closest next point now this distrib distribution because we're so tall on this guy kind of throws it off so what we can do is make him a little bit smaller and i want to distribute all of these and it's going to do them in order just like it did a second ago vertically and we have the same spacing between each so i just wanted to show you that we can stair step objects they don't have to be all lined up perfectly it's just distributed it's distributing them evenly spaced out from each other or if you select key object on that you can distribute out by a certain increment of whatever your units are now i think that pretty much covers all of the different types of alignments that you can do there's going to be other situations and it's just whatever your project calls for are you trying to line something up to the top of the artboard then align it to the artboard is it another object select that object as a key object and line up whatever elements you want to the different alignment options that you have here trying to distribute you've got options for distributing objects which works really well if they're all the same object and then also distributing spacing will make sure there's the same spacing between the bounding box of each object versus the center point so that's something to definitely remember because i know i showed you that it really kind of throws it off if if your objects are different sizes all right guys that's pretty much it for this tutorial i hope this helped you with your alignment troubles if you have any questions about this hit me up in the comments down below make sure you subscribe to this channel if you want to see more illustrator tutorials i also have the main channel and my other tutorial channels in the description down below thanks for watching i'm spencer from pixel bracket and i'll see you next time [Music] you

Channel: Pixel & Bracket Illustrator Tutorials

Views: 62,977

Keywords: pixel and bracket, illustrator, illustrator tutorial, illustrator tutorials for beginners, illustrator how to align objects, illustrator how to distribute objects evenly, how to distribute objects evenly in illustrator, how to align objects in illustrator, how to align objects in illustrator without moving one, align objects illustrator tutorial, distribute objects evenly illustrator tutorial

Id: qRWV-ZbCFbs

Length: 8min 42sec (522 seconds)

Published: Fri Sep 11 2020