Oh Snap

Quick reference

• 00:04 Another very handy and
• 00:06 useful feature in Illustrator that I'd like to touch on is the Rulers and Guides.
• 00:11 Now if I come up to the View menu here, and I go down,
• 00:13 you'll see that we have an option here called Rulers.
• 00:17 And to show the Rulers, all I have to do is press Cmd+R.
• 00:21 All right, so let's go ahead and press Cmd+R, and
• 00:23 now you will see this ruler appear.
• 00:26 So, what this allows me to do is to click and drag and
• 00:29 I can pull in guides anywhere in my canvas area, or my workspace.
• 00:35 And by default, these lines will be blue.
• 00:38 You can change the color of these lines however,
• 00:40 in your preferences by coming up to Illustrator CC, Preferences, and
• 00:44 then Guides & Grids, or Smart Guides.
• 00:49 I believe it's Guides & Grids, yes, you can change the color here.
• 00:53 Okay, so let's try and change the color to maybe Light Red instead, and hit OK.
• 00:58 And now you'll see that change updating here.
• 01:01 Okay, but one other thing that I wanna show you guys here is that you have
• 01:04 something called Smart Guides.
• 01:06 And at the moment I have that turned on, so what that does, if I click and
• 01:11 drag to make another guide, when I get close to the edge of my border here,
• 01:16 you'll see that pink text show up that just says page.
• 01:19 And that's just letting me know that I'm now on the page, or next to the page.
• 01:24 But as you move your cursor around, it'll kind of snap into place for you.
• 01:29 So that's one of the advantages of having Smart Guides, is that it'll
• 01:33 kind of detect an edge or take a guess as to where you're trying to place a guide.
• 01:37 So if I wanna place guides around all four edges of my document,
• 01:42 as soon as I get close to the edge, the Smart Guides will make it snap into place.
• 01:46 If I turn off Smart Guides and I try and
• 01:50 do that, nothing is really snapping when I get close to the edges here.
• 01:54 So, Smart Guides is just what it sounds like,
• 01:57 it's a smart way to use guides, okay?
• 02:01 So, if I come over here,
• 02:03 I have some other options aside from just the Smart Guides that I can use.
• 02:08 And some of those ways are to Snap to Grid, Snap to Pixel, or Snap to Point.
• 02:14 Now let's say for example, I wanted to get rid of my guides that I have here so far.
• 02:19 Well, an easy way to do that is to come up to the View menu, come down to Guides, and
• 02:24 then you can choose Unlock Guides and just click and drag around one and delete them.
• 02:29 Or you can come up to View, Guides and just choose Clear all Guides.
• 02:35 And now they've all been taken away.
• 02:38 And if I wanted to hide my rulers again, I'll just press Cmd+R.
• 02:42 Now, I wanna show you guys the Snap to Grid or Snap to Pixel option.
• 02:46 Let's say that I wanted to add a new art board.
• 02:48 I can come over here to the Artboard Tool, and
• 02:51 then up top in the tool bar here I can choose a New Artboard.
• 02:55 Now I wanna make sure that I have Snap to Grid or Snap to Pixel selected,
• 03:00 so let me choose Snap to Pixel.
• 03:03 Now what happens is as I'm moving around, this isn't really clicking into place for
• 03:07 me the way I want it, because we don't really have any pixels or anything for
• 03:11 it to snap to.
• 03:13 But if instead I choose Snap to Grid,
• 03:16 you'll see that it's kind of snapping into place as I move,
• 03:21 and it's making sure that my artboards are pretty much lined up.
• 03:27 Okay so if I wanted to add another one, it's going to be snapping to the grid.
• 03:32 Now, where is this grid, you may ask.
• 03:35 And that's a good question.
• 03:37 Now if I were to press Cmd+", you'll see this grid appear.
• 03:43 Now this grid can be used for a variety of things, but one of them is for
• 03:47 checking the proportions of something, for laying out typography, or even just for
• 03:52 lining things up.
• 03:53 But again, to get rid of that, I just press Cmd+" and
• 03:57 that will hide or get rid of the grid.
• 04:00 Another way that I could do that is maybe come in here and
• 04:05 I could choose Show Grid like this, and that'll turn it back on, okay?
• 04:10 But for now I'm just going to leave it hidden, and let's go ahead and
• 04:13 remove these two artboards.
• 04:16 So click on the Artboard Tool, select Artboard 6 and delete it, and
• 04:19 Artboard 5 and delete that one as well.
• 04:23 So, again just to recap, you have your guides in here,
• 04:27 you can hide your guides, lock your guides and clear your guides.
• 04:31 I usually like leaving Smart Guides turned on and then bringing up my rulers and
• 04:37 using it to line certain things up.
• 04:40 Okay now it looks like the color of my guides
• 04:44 has remained red as I showed you guys how to change that.
• 04:47 So there's a few ways that you can use guides, and
• 04:50 it's really useful any time you're doing any kind of layout or brochure design.
• 04:54 You wanna make sure that things are aligned and not all over the place.
• 04:57 So be mindful of the shortcuts here that you have to have with your guides.
• 04:59 Again if you wanna hide the guides, use the shortcut.
• 05:02 Locking them, a very similar shortcut, and to clear them,
• 05:06 just click there under the view menu by going to Guides > Clear Guides.
• 05:11 So, I just wanted to cover that really quickly with you guys cuz
• 05:14 it's a very useful and handy feature in Adobe Illustrator.

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