Discover how to add alignment to various objects within a simple business card design using a step-by-step tutorial. This guide covers everything from adding additional guides to aligning text objects within the page layout.
Key Insights
- The tutorial begins by demonstrating how to add additional guides from the left ruler at 1 eighth of an inch or 0.125 inches for precise alignment.
- The tutorial then instructs on aligning text objects within the page layout, which includes moving the text objects, such as the phone number and the text 'VDCI', to align with the added guides.
- Finally, the tutorial provides tips on modifying the text size and positioning using the selection tool to enhance the overall design of the business card.
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In this video, we're going to be adding alignment to all the objects within our simple business card. So let's begin by first adding a few additional guides. The first guide we're going to want to add is from our left ruler. We'll click and drag while holding Shift until we reach one-eighth of an inch, or 0.125 inches.
If you're unable to see the rulers or grids, you can go to the properties panel and make sure that rulers and grids are checked. Next, let's add three additional guides. We'll drag again from the left-hand side and add one-eighth of an inch, or 3.375 inches.
Remember to hold Shift to be precise. Next, we'll add two additional guides: one at the bottom right at 1.875 inches, or one-eighth of an inch up, and, holding Shift again, for the last one, we're going to add it at 0.125 inches, or one-eighth of an inch down from the top.
Finally, we need to align our various text objects within the buffer we've added to the page.
So to do this, let's select the first top-left text, our phone number, and simply click and drag it to the right-hand side. Then, drag it so that the corner of our text frame is aligned with the corner of our two guides. We'll see that they snap into place. Next, let's align VDCI.
We'll select it and simply drag it down and to the right so that it's aligned with the right-hand side. Finally, we need to align this text so that it's right-aligned. To do this, we'll go into our properties panel and select "Right Align" within the paragraph section.
We now have VDCI right-aligned. Towards the bottom, we want to align this text to the bottom by clicking and selecting it until it's aligned with the corner on the left.
Here, however, our text needs to be aligned to the bottom of our text frame.
Therefore, with it selected, we're going to go up to our control bar and make sure that we have "Align Bottom" selected. From here, we'll see that our text is nicely aligned and touches the bottom of our guide. If we zoom out by pressing CTRL MINUS (-) (-), we can get a better view of the entire business card.
Next, let's zoom back in a little closer and hit W so we can see a preview.
This looks pretty good. However, let's make a couple of additional text changes.
We'll hit W again, and the first change is that I really want our name to stand out as a little larger text. It's already in black text; however, we need to double-click it and increase the size.
In this case, I'll bump it up to 14 in our character settings within the properties panel, and this is a good size now.
Additionally, let's also change the size of VDCI on the top-right-hand side. We'll select it all and bump it up to 12 points.
Remember that if your text doesn't fit within the text frame, we can use our selection tool and simply click and drag it to an appropriate size.
Finally, if you'd like to modify anything else, feel free to use your selection tool to click and drag.
In this case, I'll move "Student" up a little bit and make any further modifications as you'd like.
We'll hit W on the keyboard, and we can see that we've now finished our basic business card.
Well done! Let's hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work, and we can close out this file now.
In the next video, we'll begin working on a more advanced business card.