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'll be lining up our objects as well as adding a line between our title and this slice. So let's begin first by adding some guides.
To do this create a new guide layer and title this guides and hit ENTER and from here let's show our rulers right clicking with the selection tool and select show rulers. We'll then want to 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 simply leave our guide at the end and making sure that our guides are unlocked by right clicking making sure they're unlocked we'll select our guide go to the X value and simply divide it by four and hit ENTER.
Next we'll create our three quarters of the way across guide by dragging off from the ruler and leaving it in the same place as our first guide snapping it to the first guide and going to the X value and multiplying it by three and hitting enter. We're now ready to line up our objects to these guides. In order to do this let's now lock our guides layer and we'll drag a selection box of our first layers and drag them to the right.
Next we'll want to select our pie graph and let's also drag this 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 and let's add a base guide right at four inches holding shift.
We'll then relock our guides drag a selection box and let's drag this so that intersects with the bottom of our guide and we'll also select our pie chart and have it also intersect with the bottom of the guide. We're now ready to add our lines. Let's create another layer and title this layer line and hit ENTER.
We also want to move this layer line up to the very top as this line will be above our pie chart as well as above our panels. Finally we need to create our line. To do this let's first find the middle of this shape using our line segment tool and dragging from one corner holding shift to drag 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 grab the ellipse tool. Next we'll hit CTRL shift a to deselect our line and 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 right about this size and let's add a stroke to it 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 we'll 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 holding shift to make sure 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 and we have our line but we need to make a couple changes. Our first change we'll use the direct selection tool shortcut a on the keyboard and we'll simply drag this anchor back until it intersects with the other line and our second correction is 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. In order 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 let's simply make sure that the stroke is set to one.
We'll type one and hit ENTER and if we hold shift and select both the path as well as the circle we'll see that one is also selected for our stroke and 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 as well as your panels feel free to change this from white to black or any other color that you'd prefer.
Let's now zoom out we'll hide our guides and we can see the result. It looks like this guide we have here is in pie graph so let's unlock guides and drag it up in the guides and relock it. As one final change I simply want to round out these rectangles.
I'll round this one to 0.3 and 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 and in the next video we'll be making a similar image. See you there!