Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Introducing Guides, Smart

Guides, and Layers

Knowing how to set up a document and customize your

artboards means that your artwork will have a good foun-

dation. But even the best of illustrators can use some assis-

tance keeping his or her ducks in a row. Layers and guides

give you the tools to do just that. Guides provide a non-

printing framework to keep your art aligned. Smart guides,

which were overhauled for CS4, are guides that Illustrator

creates on-the-fl y to help you align to objects in your il-

lustration. Layers allow you to organize your objects into

distinct groups and manipulate those groups as a whole.

In this exercise, I’ll introduce you to each of these tools in

turn. I’ll also show you how to create custom guides, iso-

late your guides on their own layer, and more.

1. Open a sample fi le. Press Ctrl+O (-O) to

bring up the Open a File (or Open) dialog

box. Navigate to the Lesson 01 folder inside

the Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1 folder. Select the fi le

ai, and click the OK button.

2.

Examine the guides. When you fi rst open the doc-

ument, it will look like the one in Figure 1-17—a

black-and-white line drawing of the eye of Horus. Con-

spicuously absent, however, are any sign of guides. The

document does indeed contain guides, but they are cur-

rently hidden. Display the guides by pressing Ctrl+

(- on the Mac) or by selecting View→Guides→Show

Guides. You should now see three cyan-colored squares,

as in Figure 1-18.

P E A R L O F W I S D O M

If you’re new to Illustrator but familiar with guides in other

programs like Photoshop or InDesign, you may be wondering how

these squares can be guides. Aren’t guides limited to horizontal or

vertical rules? In most programs, yes, but Illustrator allows you to

take any path, of any shape, and convert it to a guide

—

something

we’ll be doing later in this very exercise.

Figure 1-17 .

Figure 1-18 .

24

Lesson 1: Starting a Document