- In this movie we're going to draw these evenly sized,
evenly spaced windows
with the help of the Rectangular Grid Tool.
I'll go ahead and switch to my document in progress
and then we're going to go ahead
and skip the Spiral Tool for now
because it's the most challenging of the Tools to use.
And we're going to select the Rectangular Grid Tool
either from this independent floating Tool bar
or if you prefer, you can click and hold
on what is now the Art Tool, here in the vertical Tool box
and select the Rectangular Grid Tool from the fly-out menu.
Now before you draw anything
you'll probably want to reduce your line weight,
up here in the Control Panel,
from 30 points to just plain old one.
And then just draw it with the Tool
and you can see what it does is it draws a rectangle
with a bunch of inset, horizontal, and vertical lines.
And while you may occasionally want to draw such an object
it's more useful for setting up custom Guide lines.
Now, a couple of things to note about this Tool,
I'll go ahead and press Control Z
or Command Z on the Mac to Undo that one.
One of the best ways to use this Tool
is to start dragging with it and then
if you want to increase the number of horizontal lines
you press the up arrow key
while you have the mouse button down.
And then if you want to reduce
the number of horizontal lines you press the down arrow key.
If you want to increase the number of vertical lines
you press the right arrow key,
if you want to decrease the number
you press the left arrow key.
And that's pretty much the majority
of what you need to know about this Tool, other then
I'll just go ahead and press the Backspace key
or the Delete key on the Mac to get rid of it.
You can press and hold the shift key as you drag
to create a square grid.
You can also take advantage of that trick
where you drag and then you press the alt or option key
in order to draw out the shape from the center outward.
And then finally, you can click with the Tool
in order to bring up the Rectangular Grid Tool Options
which allow you to change the Number of Horizontal
and Vertical Dividers.
And then you could also change how the lines are spaced.
For example, if I modify these Skew values a little bit here
let's take them up to just somewhere less than a hundred
is going to work out best and now click OK.
And you can see that the Skew is affecting
the amount of space between neighboring lines
whether vertical or horizontal.
All right, but now that I've done that
I need to reset things and so I'll press Control Z
or Command Z on the Mac to Undo that change.
I'll click with the Tool
and I'll change both of these Skew values to zero
and then I'll click OK
just so that everybody's evenly spaced.
All right, now what we have to do
is create a custom Guide line.
And to make that happen
get rid of whatever you've drawn so far
and then click on the guides Layer to make it active.
And that way we're keeping all of our guides
on that one guides Layer.
And now I want you to drag from this corner, right there,
at the top left corner of the factory, essentially,
down to the bottom right corner.
And this is going to be the hardest part to follow,
by the way, just because I can't point to things.
I just have to tell you what's going on.
We're looking for a total of three windows high
which means that we need four gaps,
one at the top, one at the bottom, and two in-between,
and so I'm going to press the up arrow key
until I'm seeing a total of seven rows,
one, two, three, four, five, six, seven
which I'm seeing right now.
That's the easy part because we're looking for
a total of six columns of windows.
And so that means seven spaces
so a total of 13 in all.
So I'm just going to press the right arrow key
until, let's see what I have now.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11
I need 12, 13, so if you need to pause the movie,
look at it if it helps.
Another thing you might do is just go ahead and release
if you're growing frustrated here
and then press the Backspace key
or the Delete key to get rid of that guy and then click,
right here at this location to bring up the Dialog box
and just go ahead and enter these values, these should work.
And so we need a total of six Horizontal Dividers
to give us seven rows.
And then we need 12 Vertical Dividers
if I've done everything right here, that is,
to give us 13 columns.
At which point, go ahead and click OK
in order to create that shape.
And the reason that it's exactly the right size
is because you just got done drawing it the right size
and Illustrator remembered the dimensions.
And so now what we want to do
is convert this to a Guide line.
This is just an awesome function.
Go up to the View menu, choose Guides,
and then choose this command right there, Make Guides
which will convert anything you can draw inside Illustrator
to Guide lines, like so.
And now we've got everything we need to draw the window
so go ahead and click on the lines Layer to make it active
because we want to make sure to put all the real objects
on that Layer.
And then just by way of a preview,
we're going to switch to the Rectangle Tool
which I will explain in depth in the next chapter.
But for now, just go ahead and select it
and if necessary click and hold
and select the Rectangle Tool from the fly-out menu
and then just draw a rectangle
inside of one of these grid things right here.
And it's not working and that's because
Smart Guides are turned on.
Sometimes Smart Guides mess stuff up.
And so I'm just going to ctrl, spacebar click
or cmd, spacebar click in this area to zoom in
so we can better see what's going on.
And I'll get rid of that shape by pressing the Backspace key
or the Delete key on the Mac.
And now I'll go up to the View menu
and turn off Smart Guides.
And again, it's got a keyboard shortcut of ctrl u
cmd u on the Mac.
You may want to keep that in mind because
it does help to sometimes turn these things on and off.
And now notice if I drag inside one of these little areas
that I snap into alignment just perfectly.
And that's because Guide line snapping
works independent of Smart Guides.
All right, so now that I have this rectangle
we can't see it because it doesn't have any fill
and it has a black stroke.
We don't want it to have a stroke
so go ahead and click on this little swatch right there,
the second swatch in, and change it to None,
and then click on the first swatch.
You might have to click a couple of times
and then select white to fill that shape with white.
All right, that's all the work that we have to do
with the Rectangle Tool because from here on
we're just going to duplicate this shape
and so I'll press ctrl 0 or cmd 0 on the Mac to zoom out.
Then I'll return to the Black Arrow Tool
which of course you can get by pressing the "v" key.
And I'll go ahead and drag this guy over
and I'll press the shift and alt keys
in order to duplicate it to the right location.
But it doesn't appear really to be stamping
the way that I want it to
so it's very possible I need to turn Smart Guides back on.
So I went ahead and undid that movement
and so now go up to the View menu and choose Smart Guides
to turn them back on.
And now let's see if I can make this work better.
Yes I can.
And as I'm dragging I need to make sure
and press and hold that Alt key or the Option key on the Mac
so that I'm creating a duplicate.
And now I want to repeat that duplicate by pressing ctrl d
or cmd d on the Mac.
So I'll go ahead and press that keyboard shortcut
one, two, three, four times
in order to create a total of six windows across, like so.
All right, now we want to select all the windows
and the easiest way to do that
is to take advantage of a function
that we'll see a lot in this course.
It's up here in the Control Panel
and it's this guy right there, Select Similar Objects.
Just go ahead and click on that icon
and you'll select all of the white rectangles.
At which point, just go ahead and drag them down
and press the Alt key or the Option key on the Mac
to duplicate them.
And then press Control D or Command D again
in order to create a third row of windows.
And now you can click off the shapes to deselect them
and then turn off the guides Layer
in order to see what you've done.
And that's how you use the Rectangular Grid Tool
to create these evenly sized, evenly spaced windows
here inside Illustrator.