Aligning multiple objects in Adobe Illustrator
When you want to align multiple objects in your Adobe Illustrator document, there’s no need for dragging guides out and moving objects manually. Here’s a much easier way to align and distribute your objects easily.
Select the objects you wish to align, then click on the object you wish to use as your “key” object that you want to serve as the base object to align the others with (this can be an object or a guide). As seen in part 1 of the image above, you’ll notice that the key object has a thicker selection line around it.
Now open the align panel, and choose how you wish to align the objects. In the case of part 2 above, you can see I’ve chosen to align them vertically by the center of the objects. Click the align icon. As you see above, the objects are aligned at their center points.
Now we’ll distribute the objects evenly between the top and bottom objects using the top of each object as the key points. Keeping all three objects selected, simply click the desired alignment icon. As you see in part 3 above, the objects get evenly distributed.
Note: The same technique can be used in Adobe InDesign and Photoshop.
4 COMMENTS
Is there a way using shape builder for it to take into account the stroke width or does it only
knock out the shape without the line width?
Good tip! Worth adding that there is also an option of choosing your spacing value in the align panel. It can be set to a specific pixel value or left on Auto.
Great tip. Most people don’t expand the panel to see all the options available.
Great tip! It’s also worth noting that if you go to the align panel options menu (upper right of the align panel) and select “Show Options”, you can get to the button that allows you to change the behavior of the alignment buttons. The choices are, “Align to Selection”, “Align to Key Object”, and “Align to Artboard”.
I personally find the Align to Artboard option very handy.
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