- [Voiceover] Over the course of this chapter,
we're going to take this mess of a document
with all these squares on the first art board
and this strange text on the second one
and we're going to arrange it to create
this highly structured piece of artwork right here.
And, we're going to do so almost exclusively
using Illustrator's highly-developed alignment
and distribution functions.
So, I'm going to go ahead and switch over
to our starter document and press Shift + Page Up
in order to go back to the first art board.
We're going to start things off
with Illustrator's simplest alignment functions
which are Snapping and Smart Guides.
And so, for example, let's say I want to move
these four central squares into alignment with each other,
then I can click on any one of them to select them
and assuming that my Bounding Box is turned off,
I can drag this square by one of its corner handles.
And let me just make this perfectly clear.
Notice if I went to the View Menu
and I chose Show Bounding Box
in order to turn the Bounding Box back on,
then if I were to attempt to drag by a corner point
I would end up scaling the shape.
And, there's a lot folks who like to work that way
and that's perfectly acceptable.
I don't like to work this way, however,
because there's so many better ways
to scale inside of Illustrator.
We just saw the best one, which is the Scale tool,
in the previous chapter.
And so, I'm going to press Control + Z
or Command + Z on the Mac
to undo that change
and then I'll go to the View Menu
and choose Hide Bounding Box
to get rid of it.
And now, notice if I drag this corner point
then I can drag it until it snaps into alignment
with the top-left anchor point
associated with this green square.
And I know I've got a snap because my cursor
goes from solid black to hollow white
and I'm also seeing that Smart Guide that tells me
that I have an intersection between
the centers of the shapes.
And these are a function of two commands
under the View Menu.
First of all, you can see I have my Smart Guides turned on
and then, if I were to scroll down the menu,
I also have Snap to Point turned on.
And I recommend, under almost all circumstances,
that you leave that check-box on.
The only time you would turn that command off
is if the snapping is somehow getting in your way,
when you don't want two anchor points to snap together.
Alright, so I'll just go ahead and press the Escape key
in order to hide that menu.
Another way to work, by the way,
because we do have Smart Guides turned on,
is to just click on a shape
and you can drag it by its center point,
because this is a rectangle after all,
or you could even switch to the rectangle tool nowadays
which by default turns into a section tool
when you hover over a selected shape.
And so, if you want to move the shape
you drag it by its center point like so,
and then thanks to the fact
that I have Smart Guides turned on
I can go ahead and move that guy into a position
where it snaps into alignment with the other squares.
And by the way,
this is a function of this little icon right there
which allows you to hide the shape widgets
if you don't want them
or, turn those shape widgets back on
if you like this feature.
And so, finally, I'll go ahead and select this guy
by pressing the Control key, or the Command key on the Mac,
which is going to get me my last-used arrow tool
which happens to be the black arrow
at which point, I'll just go ahead and click on that shape
to select it and then I'll release the Control key
or the Command key on the Mac
and drag this square by its center point once again
in order to snap it into alignment
with its three neighbors.
And that's how you work with the simplest
of the alignment functions,
Snapping and Smart Guides,
here inside Illustrator.