Learn how to expertly align design elements and add lines to your work using the guide layer technique in a graphics editing tool. This article provides a detailed, step-by-step guide on how to create precise alignment and professional-looking lines in your graphic designs.
Key Insights:
- The guide layer technique can be used for accurate alignment of objects and the addition of lines in graphic designs. It involves creating new guides, showing rulers, and dividing by specific values for precise positioning.
- After aligning objects to guides and locking the guide layer, lines can be added using the line segment tool. The line layer should be moved to the top as it will be above other elements like the pie chart and panels.
- Finalizing the design involves making corrections to the line using the direct selection tool, joining separated line segments, setting stroke width and color, and rounding out rectangles for a softened image. This shows the importance of attention to detail in creating professional-looking graphic designs.
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In this video, we will be lining up our objects and adding a line between our title and this slice. Let’s begin by adding some guides.
To do this, create a new guide layer, name it 'Guides, ' and hit ENTER. From here, let’s show our rulers by right-clicking with the Selection Tool and selecting 'Show Rulers.'
Next, we’ll add a guide one-quarter of the way across and three-quarters of the way across. While we could do the math ourselves, we can also leave our guide at the end. Making sure our guides are unlocked by right-clicking and ensuring they are unlocked, we’ll select our guide, go to the X value, divide it by four, and hit ENTER.
Next, we’ll create our three-quarters-of-the-way-across guide by dragging from the ruler and leaving it in the same place as our first guide. We’ll snap it to the first guide, go to the X value, multiply it by three, and hit ENTER.
We are now ready to line up our objects to these guides. To do this, let’s now lock our guides layer. We’ll drag a selection box around our first layers and drag them to the right.
Next, we’ll select our pie graph and drag it to the right until it lines up. Here, we now have our pie graph and our stats perfectly lined up between the one-quarter mark and the three-quarters mark.
Let’s now add another guide by unlocking our guide layer. We’ll add a base guide right at four inches, holding shift.
We’ll then relock our guides, drag a selection box, and drag this so that it intersects with the bottom of our guide. We’ll also select our pie chart and have it intersect with the bottom of the guide.
We are now ready to add our lines. Let’s create another layer, title it 'Line, ' and hit ENTER.
We also want to move this 'Line' layer to the very top, as this line will be above our pie chart and panels.
Finally, we need to create our line. To do this, let’s first find the middle of this shape using the Line Segment Tool. Drag from one corner, holding shift, to draw at a 45-degree angle until we reach the end of our shape.
From here, we know that this is the center of our line. We’ll want to create an ellipse right here, so we’ll click and hold the Rectangle Tool to select the Ellipse Tool.
Next, we’ll hit CTRL + SHIFT + A to deselect our line. When it says 'Intersect, ' we’ll click and drag out, holding ALT and shift to make a circle.
We’ll release when we have a circle about this size, then add a stroke to it by selecting Color with Stroke highlighted.
We’ll then hit CTRL + SHIFT + A to deselect, and we’re now ready to add our line.
The first line we want to add is from our title panel, so we’ll use the Line Segment Tool and drag from the intersection of the middle of our title panel all the way to the left to the end of our circle.
Next, we want to add an additional line from our circle at a 45-degree angle, up and to the right.
To do this, we’ll find the center and hold shift to ensure we draw at a 45-degree angle. Let’s release right when we’ve intersected with our line.
We’ll then hit CTRL + SHIFT + A to deselect. We have our line, but we need to make a couple of changes.
Our first change: we’ll use the Direct Selection Tool (shortcut A) on the keyboard and drag this anchor back until it intersects with the other line. Our second correction: we’ll select the anchor inside the circle and drag it out so it intersects with the circle.
If we click outside, we can see the result.
Zooming in using CTRL + PLUS (+), we’ll see that we have two end line segments; however, they’re separated. To bring these together, we’ll hit V on the keyboard and select both paths, holding shift.
We’ll then right-click and select 'Join.' If they’re lined up together, it will make one path.
Finally, let’s zoom out, and we’ll see our result.
As an additional change, let’s select our two panels, holding shift, and make sure that the stroke is set to one. We’ll type one and hit ENTER. If we hold shift and select both the path and the circle, we’ll see that one is also selected for our stroke. Let’s make sure that our stroke is set to black.
Clicking outside, we can see our result. Depending on the color of your pattern and panels, feel free to change this from white to black or any other color you prefer.
Let’s now zoom out, hide our guides, and we can see the result. It looks like this guide we have here is in the pie graph, so let’s unlock the guides, drag it up, and relock it.
As one final change, let’s round out these rectangles. I’ll round this one to 0.3, and for the top one, I’ll use live corners. I’ll round this one to 0.15, and I think it helps to soften the image.
Finally, if we need to make any other adjustments such as increasing the size of our title bar, I’ll hold ALT as I drag up. However, feel free to make changes based on your preference.
Again, I’ll select both of these, making sure that the stroke is set to one, and hit ENTER.
Finally, we’ve completed our image. Let’s hit CTRL + S on the keyboard to save our work. In the next video, we will make a similar image. See you in the next video!