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About this lesson
This lesson will teach you what alignment guides are and how you can use them.
Exercise files
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Quick reference
Topic
This lesson will teach you what alignment guides are and how you can use them.
When to use
Alignment guides allow you to ensure that objects are aligned exactly horizontal or vertical on a slide or even relative to other objects. We can even create our own custom alignment guides.
Instructions
Misaligned objects is a common problem that most presentation designers suffer from. This problem can be easily resolved with alignment guides.
Alignment guides appear automatically as we approach the center of a slide vertically and horizontally. As we approach these guides, the object will snap into place.
If we have multiple objects on a single slide, alignment guides will also indicate when the two objects are aligned with each other.
To center a group of objects on a slide:
- select multiple objects at the same time
- move the selected objects on the slide until they snap to an alignment guide
To change the color of your alignment guides:
- go to Keynote > Preferences…
- click on the Rulers tab
- change the color of your alignment guide option
To create your own custom alignment guide:
- show our ruler by going to View > Show Rulers
- drag a new alignment guide down from our ruler
To adjust or remove a guide, we either move it to a new location on the slide, or move it off the slide altogether.
Alignment guides apply only to the slide itself. They are not file-wide or system-wide.
We can also apply custom alignment guides to Master Slides.
Login to download- 00:05 You would be surprised and shocked how many times I have reviewed a slide
- 00:08 deck that contains objects that are misaligned.
- 00:11 What do I mean by misaligned?
- 00:13 Let's take this slide as an example.
- 00:15 There are two objects on this slide.
- 00:17 On the surface, many would say that they are aligned vertically with each other but
- 00:22 when you look closely, you can see that they actually aren't.
- 00:25 Still can't see it?
- 00:27 Let select some empty space on the slide to create a temporary line.
- 00:31 If the objects were aligned vertically,
- 00:33 they would both be selected at the same time.
- 00:35 Since they aren't aligned, they won't be selected at the same time.
- 00:39 To be clear, the problem here is not that they are selected at different times as we
- 00:42 are designing our slide, it's that they should be aligned, but they aren't.
- 00:47 This is a lack of attention to detail.
- 00:49 Keynote has a really, really cool tool built in to help avoid these visual
- 00:53 mistakes, and to keep our objects aligned with other like objects.
- 00:57 Let's clear the screen so I can show you a few examples.
- 01:01 First let's add a single object to our canvas.
- 01:04 By default, that object will be placed in the exact center of our canvas.
- 01:09 As we move the object around on our canvas,
- 01:11 you will notice some yellow lines that seem to appear from time to time.
- 01:15 These are our alignment guides The vertical alignment guide will confirm when
- 01:19 we are aligned to the center of the canvas, horizontally.
- 01:23 Not only will this show you visually, but the object will actually snap into place.
- 01:28 And if you happen to be using a Magic Trackpad 2,
- 01:30 like I am, you will also feel the feedback in your fingers.
- 01:34 Very cool.
- 01:35 The horizontal alignment guide will confirm when we are aligned to the center
- 01:39 of the canvas vertically, with the same feedback.
- 01:43 Let's move this object off center, just a little bit, and add another object.
- 01:47 As we move this object around our slide,
- 01:49 you can see the guidelines as we saw before, which
- 01:52 will confirm when the object is centered on the slide horizontally and vertically.
- 01:58 In addition to these guides, we have a new set of
- 02:00 alignment guides that are relative to the first object that we placed on the slide.
- 02:05 Keynote is smart enough to let us know when a second object is in alignment
- 02:09 with another object,
- 02:10 because in most cases we want to align those two objects to each other.
- 02:15 Here's another example.
- 02:16 I have four images that I want to align
- 02:19 with each other as well as to the center of the slide.
- 02:21 First, let's align them to each other.
- 02:24 Because they are the same size, this should be pretty straight forward.
- 02:28 Now the images are aligned with each other,
- 02:30 let's center them with the slide horizontally.
- 02:33 To do this, we will select all four images at the same time and
- 02:37 acting as a single object at least temporarily, we'll move them on
- 02:41 the slide until they're snapped into place center to the slide horizontally.
- 02:46 Next, lets add a text box underneath the first image, and
- 02:49 align that to the center of the image above.
- 02:53 By now, you should start to understand how the alignment guides work.
- 02:57 Before we finish, let me share with you two more tricks I use
- 03:00 often when working with alignment guides.
- 03:03 The first allows you to change the color of the guides.
- 03:05 Yellow is okay but I prefer something that stands out a little bit more like red.
- 03:10 To change the color of your alignment guide, let's go to Keynote and
- 03:14 preferences.
- 03:16 From here, we can click on the rulers button.
- 03:19 We can change the color of the alignment guides by clicking on the yellow block
- 03:23 next to the alignment guides like this.
- 03:26 There maybe other options related to alignment guides that you want to review
- 03:29 while you're in this window.
- 03:31 In some cases, you may want to add your own custom guide location.
- 03:36 For example, we may want to add a custom guide near the bottom of our slide
- 03:40 that we plan on snapping several objects to a later time.
- 03:44 To create our own guide we first need to view our ruler.
- 03:48 We can do this by going to view and show rulers.
- 03:52 Next we simply place our cursor in our top ruler
- 03:55 then drag down to the location of the new alignment guide.
- 03:59 This will create a vertical alignment guide.
- 04:02 To create a horizontal guide we do the same thing but
- 04:05 we'd use the left ruler to begin the process.
- 04:09 These custom guides can be adjusted or deleted at anytime.
- 04:12 To adjust the guide simply click and drag the guide to another location.
- 04:17 To remove a guide, drag it all the way to the top or
- 04:20 to the left of the canvass and then it will disappear.
- 04:24 These custom guides are not system-wide, application-wide, or even file-wide.
- 04:29 When we add a custom guide, it only applies to that slide.
- 04:33 If we want to use the same guide on another slide,
- 04:36 we would either apply that guide to a master slide by clicking on view,
- 04:40 edit master slides, or copy and paste the slide with the custom guide.
- 04:46 This will create a duplicate of the slide that we can now work with.
- 04:50 There's a lot of power in using alignment guides.
- 04:52 And now that you know how to use them, the power is in your hands.
- 04:55 Happy aligning.
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