Subtitles section Play video Print subtitles (lively music) - [Deke] In this movie, I'll show you how to distribute selected objects so that there's a specific amount of room between each object and its neighbors. And so you can see here in the final version of the artwork, that we have an even amount of space between each one of our squares, as opposed to having them all absolutely adjacent to each other as they are now. And that spacing is absolutely even up here at the top of the first row, between each one of the rows, and down here at the bottom as well. So in other words, we have a total of one, two, three, four, five gaps that we need to bear in mind. All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over to my document in progress. You may recall that I made my artboard 100 points bigger than it was before. And so if you take 100 and divid by those five gaps, then you can anticipate that each one of the gaps is going to be 20 points. And so I'm going to start things off by selecting all these squares, which I can do by going up to the select menu and choose All on Active Artboard, or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + Alt + A or Command + Option + A on a Mac. And then I'll just go ahead and drag this top left anchor point until it snaps into alignment with the top right corner of the artboard. But for whatever reason, if I zoom in here, you can see that that didn't quite work. If that happens to you, then the most rock solid solution is to bring up the transform panel by clicking on the word transform on the right side of the control panel, then select this top point in the small reference point matrix, and notice your X and Y values. In my case, the X value is zero points. That's with respect to the artboard, by the way, which is perfect. However, my Y value is 2.827 for whatever reason. So I'll just change it to zero as well, and then press the Tab key. And that goes ahead and moves the square into exactly the proper location. Now you may wonder, well, why didn't I just go ahead and use my alignment functions right here in order to, for example, switch this align icon to align to artboard? And then I could click on vertical line top. Problem is that's going to move all those objects independently with the exception of the grouped objects in the center. So I figured just dragging the objects was the better solution. All right, I'll go ahead and press Control + Z or Command + Z on a Mac to undo that move. And now what we need to do is scoot the squares 20 points down and 20 points to the right. And so with my black arrow tool selected, I'll just go ahead and press the enter key or the return key on a Mac and I'll change both the horizontal and vertical values to 20 points, and I'll turn on the preview checkbox, at which point, we'll see those guys scoot into the proper locations. All right, I'll go ahead and click okay in order to accept that change. Now, if you're really on the ball, you could tell me that I wasted a little time there. That wasn't the most efficient approach because after all, we were just looking at the transform panel and I could've just changed the X and Y values to 20 points. In which case, good for you for noticing that. All right, now what I want to do is distribute these guys by a specific increment. And I can do that by bringing up the full align panel. And to make that happen, go to the window menu and choose the align command, which appears in my case over here on the right-hand side of the screen. And notice that we're seeing the six align icons along with the six distribute icons. If you're not seeing anything more, then you need to click on this double arrow head right next to the word align, and that'll bring up the distribute spacing option. Notice, however, that it's currently dimmed, and that's because to make it available, you have to select a key object. And so I'll just go ahead and click on this top left square in order to make it the key object, because after all, it's the only one that's in the proper position. And now, as you can see, distribute spacing is available to me. I'll go ahead and change this value here to 20 points because that's the size of the gap, and then I'll click horizontal distribute space. And that's going to make an absolute disaster of things, as you can see, I'll go ahead and zoom out here. And the reason that this is happening is because Illustrator is distributing every single one of the squares 20 points away from its neighbor, except for those four in the center, and that's because they're grouped together. What we need to do is first group our squares in the columns, and I'm going to do that by zooming back in and I'll of course undo this mess. And in order to make things work, I'm going to have to ungroup these four squares in the center. That doesn't mean you have to select them independently of the other ones, by the way. You can go up to the object menu and choose the ungroup command or press Control + Shift + G or Command + Shift + G on the Mac and that'll ungroup any groups inside the selection. And so I'll go ahead and choose that command, at which point I can now see the word rectangle over here in the far left side of the control panel. And that tells me that I no longer have any groups because previously it would've appeared as mixed objects. All right, now I'm just going to marquee these four objects in the first row, and I'll press Control + G or Command + G on the Mac to group 'em. And then I'll marquee this next column, press Control + G, the third column, press Control + G, and the fourth one, and then press Control + G, and of course, that's Command + G on the Mac. All right, now if I press Control + A or Command + A on the Mac, to select everything, and by the way, that is the wrong keyboard shortcut, because I selected all these letters on the second artboard as well. Don't want that. So what I need to do instead is go to the select menu and choose All on Active Artboard or press Control + Alt + A or Command + Option + A on the Mac. All right, now notice once again, distribute spacing is dimmed. And so what I need to do is establish a key object by clicking on that top left square, which is going to select the entire first group. And then if I click horizontal distributed space, I ended up getting the exact effect I'm looking for. All right, now we're going to want to vertically distribute the space, but that means first grouping the squares into rows. So I'll start off by going up to the object menu and choosing ungroup, and that's going to ungroup all four of the groups, by the way. Then I'll marquee these top squares, press Control + G or Command + G to group them. The next row, group them. The third row, group them. And finally, the fourth row, followed by Control + G or Command + G on a Mac to group them. All right, now I'll just go ahead and marquee these guys instead of selecting everything on the artboard. And now notice, again, this object is dimmed because we don't have a key object. And in case that doesn't make sense, just think about it. You have to tell Illustrator which of these rows is supposed to be fixed in place so it knows that the other rows are the ones that are getting moved. Now notice we have this align to option right there, and you can switch it to align to key object. In which case Illustrator is going to randomly select a key object for you. That's not the row I want, however. So I'll just click on the top row, which will both deactivate the bottom row and set the top row as a key object, as you're seeing now. After which point, go ahead and click on vertical distribute space in order to move those rows so that they're exactly 20 points apart. After which point, I'll just go ahead and click off the objects to deselect them. And that's how you distribute selected objects by a specific amount of space using the distribute spacing options down here at the bottom of the align panel. (lively music)
A2 distribute align object mac press spacing Illustrator Tutorial - Distribute objects 12 0 Summer posted on 2022/12/10 More Share Save Report Video vocabulary