Rulers and Guides

For this lesson, what I got away was the vast usage of rulers and guides to get precise results for your artwork.

Rulers and guides help align text and graphic objects. To begin, head to the View and choose Rulers, then Show Rulers, making a top and side ruler appear.

When finding exact measurements on an artboard, it’s easiest to have the 0,0 point aligning with the artboard. If the 0,0 point isn’t set up with the artboard, place the cursor in between the horizontal and vertical guides, then click and drag and move it to an ideal spot. However, when working with multiple artboards, it becomes very difficult to find a measurement. To fix that, head to View and Rulers once again and select Change to Artboard Rulers, which sets the 0,0 point to the active artboard.

Another good thing about rulers is that if you want to zoom in, the tick marks are updated based upon magnification. You can also change the measurement by right clicking on the ruler and selecting a unit of measurement.

When working with rulers, you’re simultaneously working with guides, too. To create a guide, place the cursor in the ruler, then click and drag out a guide. Click again to set down the guide and lock it in place in the View menu, then Guides, then Lock Guides.

There are many uses with guides like moving them wherever and turning off visibility. To do that, head to View, then Guides, then Hide Guides. You can also toggle the guide either horizontally and vertically by clicking and dragging on the ruler and holding down the Alt key.

A nice feature of Illustrator gives you the ability to make a guide out of a path. Create a rectangular shape with the Rectangle Tool, then View, Guides and Make Guides, and that shape is now a guide. You can undo that by simply going into View, then Guides, then Release Guides. Make sure it isn’t locked or else this feature can’t work. Finally, to get rid of the guides, head back to View, then Guides, then Clear Guides.