From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

Aligning objects - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator 2021 Essential Training

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Aligning objects

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- [Instructor] Let's take a look at our alignment options here in Illustrator. If I select a single object, I'll just pick up this yellow plane at the top here, the alignment options become immediately available in the control strip at the top of the screen if you're using that, and also in the Properties panel, and they are set to align to Art board by default, so here, if I wanted to align it to the center of the Art board, or the top center of the Art board, or the bottom center of the Art board, or even the bottom left, or right, or wherever you want to go with it, then that's how it will work with a single object. As soon as you select two or more items, then it becomes relative to those two or more items. And you can see here that it's now switched to align to selection. So if I go ahead and choose align top, then everything will align to the top most of those objects, and so on. And all of the usual options, you'd expect to find here left, center, right top, middle, and bottom. However, if I select all three planes, okay, and I additionally click on one of the planes, I'll click on the blue plane, just here, that becomes a key object, and then everything will align to that object. So if I now choose Align Center, you'll see that the red plane has disappeared underneath the yellow plane because that's where it is in the stacking order. And they are aligned center to the blue plane. I'll just undo that and once again, click on the blue plane to make it a key object. And this time, I'll choose align top and you'll see that the yellow and the red plane move down so they are aligned to that key object. So remember that if you're selecting using the Shift key for example, if I select the blue plane and Shift click the red plane, you don't need to hold any key down to make an object a key, you simply click on it and if it's part of that selected group, it will become the key object. And some operations such as the distribution operations we'll be looking at shortly, they rely on a key object in a few cases. If you ever need to actually access the other options for alignment, they are actually available here in the Align panel, whether it's here the main panel or in the control strip, and you can see a line to selection, aligned to key objects and the lines artboard there. If you need to override the intelligence selection there and work manually.

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