Turn on Grids and Snap Options

Very often, designers want to be able to easily and quickly constrain objects to set sizes. Illustrator offers a variety of features for setting up your workspace with rulers, grids, and guides. You can elect to snap to rulers, grids, or even other objects.

View Grids

Grids make it easy to locate or size objects as you create them. To view grid lines, select View Show Grid from the menu. Figure 2-9 shows grids being used to help draw an illustration.

Figure 2-9: Grid lines help constrain the size of objects in the illustration.

To make your grid lines sticky ”so that objects drawn near the grid jump to the grid ”select View Snap to Grid.

To control the spacing between grid lines, the display color , or the subdivisions within (between) grid lines, choose Illustrator (Edit) Preferences Guides & Grid and change the settings.

Show Rulers and Create Guides

Rulers display on the horizontal and vertical borders of the Illustrator window. Choosing View Show Rulers displays rulers, and View Hide Rulers removes them. The unit of measurement will be determined by the settings in the Units & Display Performance dialog box discussed earlier in this chapter.

You can create guides ” custom-defined horizontal or vertical alignment rules ”by dragging a horizontal or vertical ruler onto your page. Custom guides can define your page size or other parameters useful in a drawing, as shown in Figure 2-10.

Figure 2-10: Custom guides (in red) help size a folding business card.

By default, guides are locked. If you want to move them, first choose View Guides and deselect Lock Guides. Then you can select guides with the Select tool and drag them to new locations. Or you can select a guide and delete it by pressing the DELETE key.

Note  

Remember, guides are visible but they do not print. To see your document without guides, choose View Guides Hide Guides.