Master the art of creating and aligning text frames in design using smart guides and selection tools. Learn how to maintain consistency in your work and understand the various alignment options available to enhance your design output.
Key Insights
- The article explains how to use different design tools to create and align text frames accurately. It mentions the use of smart guides to ensure consistency and precision in your design.
- It emphasizes the benefits of using selection tools to easily click, select, and move objects around. The article also explains how to create guides and lock them to avoid accidental movement.
- The article further covers aligning objects both within frames and within the page. This involves utilizing the properties panel and paragraph alignment to align the text perfectly in the center of your text frame.
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In this video we'll continue working on our basic business card. Let's first start by collapsing our properties panel.
We can do this by clicking on the icon and now we have a slightly larger space for us to view our page. From here we've now created our name in the middle, and you'll see your name on the page. Below this we want to create our title and so to do that let's again select our type tool, and we're now going to create a second text frame. We'll notice that we have multiple arrows here, indicating that we've now created a box exactly the same size.
These smart guides can be helpful for consistency. From here let's type in the word student and we'll select all of the text by dragging over it. Going to our top control bar, let's type in 'Chivo.' From our Chivo options, rather than using black again, let's select 'Chivo Light, ' and from here we click outside. We can see that we have our name and 'student' below.
Let's hit CTRL+Shift+A on the keyboard to deselect. Next let's talk a little bit about selection tools. The first selection tool is the selection tool, with the shortcut 'V' on the keyboard.
This selection tool allows us to click objects and select them. If we click and drag, we can move them around. In this case, let's move our text name to about the center, and again we'll see that we have a smart guide showing the pink line in the middle, indicating that the bottom is at the halfway mark. If you don't see these smart guides, we can make sure to turn them on by going to 'View, ' hovering over 'Grids and Guides, ' and making sure that 'Smart Guides' is checked.
Additionally, we also want to have 'Snap to Guides' and 'Lock Column Guides' turned on. If we click outside, and now we can see that we have our name roughly in the center.
We can create guides with our selection tool by hovering over the ruler on either the left or top side of our file. If we click within our ruler, we can click and drag, and we'll begin creating a guide. In the case of this guide, we want it to be halfway down, so we could release right at one inch, or if we hold 'Shift, ' we'll see that it moves in increments according to the ruler. So holding 'Shift' will release right at one inch, and we'll see that we now have a line or guide across our page.
Next let's create an additional guide by clicking the left ruler and dragging over to the right. Since it's three and a half inches wide, we'll release our guide, holding 'Shift' right at one and three-quarters (1.75 inches). Next we'll want to lock our guides. To do this, we'll right-click, select 'Grids and Guides, ' and then select 'Lock Guides.'
While normally we could select and move them, with them locked, we won't accidentally click them and move them to a location that we don't want them in. We're now ready to exactly line up our text within the center of our page. To do this, let's first start with our name.
We'll select it, and with it selected, we're going to go to the top and first align it from the top to the bottom, clicking the three lines within our control bar that allow it to align to the bottom. Next we want to align our entire text frame to the center. While we could do this with the selection tool and click and drag it over until it's centered, we can also go to the top where we have align options.
From here this will align the entire text frame according to however we'd prefer to align it. On the right-hand side, we can define how we want to align our object. In this case, we want to align it to the entire page, so we'll select 'Align to Page.'
Finally, we'll click this center one, 'Align Horizontal Center, ' and we'll see that our text frame perfectly aligns to the center. Let's now do the same thing with 'student' below. We'll click 'student, ' and we'll make sure it aligns to the top rather than the bottom, and then we'll again go to 'Align Horizontal.'
Finally, with our selection tool (shortcut 'V' on the keyboard), we'll drag it so the top is a bit below the title of our name. As a final alignment, we now need to align the text within the text frame.
To do this, we're going to select both text frames by clicking one and holding 'Shift' to select the other until both are selected, as indicated by the blue box around both.
Now, to align our text within our text frame, we'll go to our properties panel, as shown in the icon on the top right. From here, we're going to scroll all the way down to the bottom to 'Paragraph.'
For our paragraph alignment, we'll select 'Align Center, ' and here we go. We now have our text aligned in the center of our text frame, and our two text frames aligned to the center of our page.
In addition, we also have the top name aligned to the bottom of the frame and the title aligned to the top of the frame.
Let's click outside and save our work by hitting CTRL+S on the keyboard. In the next video, we'll begin adding additional elements to our business card. See you there!