Explore how to align elements on your page in a more systematic fashion by creating grids and guides. This process involves learning to manipulate properties in the grid and guide panels, and how to apply them to create a measured and structured design.
Key Insights
- The document grid in the properties panel can be set up to show a grid every eighth of an inch, ensuring a uniform alignment of page elements.
- Both horizontal and vertical dimensions can be subdivided into an inch with one subdivision, offering a precise way of measuring out the entire front of the page or a card.
- Guides and grids can be used together in manipulating page elements, as guides can be created at specific measurements and images or text frames can be dragged in line with the guide for a more accurate layout.
Note: These materials offer prospective students a preview of how our classes are structured. Students enrolled in this course will receive access to the full set of materials, including video lectures, project-based assignments, and instructor feedback.
In this video, we're going to begin aligning some of these elements to our page. So let's begin by hitting W on our keyboard so we can go back to our normal view.
And this time, rather than aligning exclusively with guides, we're going to create some grids. To do this, we'll go into our properties panel and within rulers and grids, we'll select the far right hand side to show our document grid. Right now, it's set up to show a grid every eighth of an inch.
However, we can make changes to this. To do this, we'll go to edit and we'll go all the way down to the bottom where we have preferences and to the right here, we'll select grids. Within grids, we can see that we currently have a grid line every one inch with eight subdivisions.
Instead, let's change this to just one inch with one subdivision. We'll do this both with horizontal and vertical and we'll click okay. Now we can see here that we have a grid every inch and I think inches are a good way to kind of measure out this entire front of our page or the front of our card.
So for this top section, let's create this first black box within the second inch or from one inch to two inches down. To do this, we'll select our rectangle and we'll simply drag it up until it's in line with the grid. Again, we'll do the same below.
Sometimes we need to zoom in a bit and we'll drag down until it's in line with the grid. As a double check, we can look at our transform and with this rectangle selected, we'll see that it has a height of one inch. Next, let's utilize our image here and zooming out.
I think rather than having a very even down the middle 50-50 split, let's have it just so it's off to the right-hand side a bit. To do this, let's create a guide right at two and two-eighths or a quarter inch. We'll drag our guide here all the way to the right-hand side until we're in line at 2.25 inches and with this guide now, let's drag our image frame so it's in line with our guide.
Here we have an example of using both guides and grids to be able to create our work. We'll then select our rectangle here and just make sure that goes all the way to the guide. Next, let's scroll down a bit and for our white rectangle here, let's make sure that it's within six and eight on the left-hand side.
We'll drag it down below and drag the top so that it's in line with our grid right at six inches and dragging the bottom here, we'll again drag it down. Sometimes we'll need to zoom in and we'll make sure that it's right in line with our grid and release. We'll double check here and see it has a height of two inches.
If we zoom out now, our final change is we need to select our black rectangle on the bottom and simply line it up with the grid as well dragging all the way to the bleed here and then dragging the left-hand side so that it's in line with our guide and we'll drag this rectangle so it's in line with the bleed. Additionally, we can select our text here hitting CTRL shift a and selecting the text frame and we'll drag that below. Looking up here at our image frame, we're going to now drag this down below and let's scroll up and drag our image frame so it's in line with the bleed.
When we drag the top so it's in line with the bleed, the guide and bottoms out on our white rectangle, we can right click and select fitting and fill frame proportionally. Now if we zoom out hitting CTRL MINUS (-) on the keyboard and hit w, we'll see that there's a consistency in our alignment for all of these elements and we're starting to get a better feel for how our work will look. Let's now hit CTRL S on the keyboard to save our work and in the next video we'll be stylizing our text.
See you there!