Use visual guides in After Effects, including traditional guidelines, title/action safe areas, and proportional grids. Understand the differences between these tools and how to customize them for various screen formats and design needs.
Key Insights
- Users can create manual guidelines in After Effects using rulers or keyboard shortcuts, and these guides are useful for aligning content, especially when snap-to-guide is enabled.
- The Proportional Grid is an adjustable overlay that divides the composition into proportional units (defaulting to 8x6) and supports compositional design rules like the rule of thirds; however, it does not allow snapping.
- Unlike the Proportional Grid, the document Grid allows elements to snap into place, offering more precise control for layout alignment; Noble Desktop recommends using the Proportional Grid in their instructions as a visual aid for layout planning.
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So guidelines are made from rulers, which are basically view show rulers or keyboard shortcut from Photoshop and Illustrator, by the way. And I could drag a guideline out like that. By the way, the color of the guidelines is a preference.
It's really light to be in with, by the way. And I could now, Hey, this is where I know that the text is going to end. When I overshoot, I know to go above that line.
Okay. That's one way. I'm going to view clear my guides and then I'm going to hide the rulers because there's another way.
It's two other ways. It's one other way, really. Okay.
So guidelines are very helpful. The problem with things will snap to guides. It's great when you're trying to organize stuff.
Definitely. Okay. But there's a couple other visual aids that you may want to use.
One of them is taken directly from video editing programs. The other is unique to this application that I've seen. Okay.
At the bottom of the composition panel is a series of buttons. That one that looks like a crosshair. If I press and hold on that, these are the guide and grid options.
Okay. Title action safe is a area used in broadcast television. Okay.
And you may, it's an option you can actually display in video editing programs. Pretty common. Okay.
It's basically designed to break off the space into 10% from the edge and 20% from the edge. By the way, the other weird ones in here, that's basically showing you different shape televisions like widescreen versus non-widescreen, which I'd argue you can probably ignore because that hasn't been a, I don't know. The last television station I know that used to design for non-widescreen televisions was Fox news.
And they stopped doing that about 10 years ago. So I'd say you don't, I say, I don't care about the other space. Okay.
That's not bad, but there's another one. Proportional grid. The portion of grid breaks down your compositions dimensions into proportional units by default.
It's eight across and it's six down. Okay. So this was designed.
So the wall bottom of the Y hit that grid line. We built that for this list. Okay.
Now what if you don't want those number of units? That's cool. People trained in design, maybe used to a concept called the rule of thirds, After Effects settings, grids and guides. That's the number of horizontal invertible units.
The compositional rule, rule of thirds would be three vertical, three horizontal. Okay. Like that.
So it's basically a way of breaking the space up into an overlay that breaks it into proportional spacing. Okay. And you can control how it does it.
I mean it may as you want. Okay. Now I'm going to go, that is not undoable.
I have to go back and actually set that again. I'm sorry. What's that? Sorry.
So eight and six is the default. Eight and six is designed to work on widescreen video screens. If you're doing like square eight and six would have no logical meaning whatsoever.
It would just look weird. If you're doing something with square size like Instagram, I did yesterday change the horizontal and vertical, same number, whatever you happen to like, like six and six, three and three, whatever you do. Okay.
I think if you do like one and one, they'll just make a cross in the middle, honestly. So it's kind of hard. Okay.
So one other thing I'm going to hide that one because there is one other visual aid, the grid. This is a document grid that you see in multiple programs. The main difference between the grid and the proportional grid is things will snap to the grid.
Okay. So three different, well, it's kind of like a sport at front cause you got the grid, portional grid action title safe and the ability to manually make whatever guideline you please from the rulers are cool. Okay.
Whatever one you want to use is fine. The instructions use portional grid. So I'm going to turn off the grid from here, go back to portional grid.
And it's really just a reference. Okay. Things snap to the grid.
Things do not snap to the portional grid portion of it is merely an overlay. So nothing snaps to it. Okay.
It's a visual overlay, right? So the instructions have this and it's really just because, so I know where do we send this to? Okay. So the headline is going to be animated and then it's going to be cut up. Okay.
So there is a big box on page 74. What is the proportional grid? Okay. It explains what this is.
Okay.