Guides

Alignment. All good design requires it. And not all applications give you the tools do it.

The Guides tool allows you to align elements on your screen regardless of the application you are using.

The first thing you'll want to do after clicking on the toolbar icon shown above is to create a new guide. The following methods can be used:

Use the Guides Wizard

The easiest way to create a new guide is to use the Guides Wizard. Just press ⌘G to display the wizard's dialog.

In this dialog, you have a choice to create the guide visually or numerically. The visual method lets you click anywhere on the screen to create a horizontal or vertical guide. The numeric method lets you enter exact coordinates for one or more guides.

When you are using the visual method, the screen will dim slightly to let you know that the tool is waiting for a mouse click. After you click on the dimmed screen, a new guide will be created.

Use the Menu or Keyboard

You can create a horizontal or vertical guide using the menu and shortcut keys.

When you press ⇧⌘H, a new horizontal guide will be created in the middle of the screen. You can use ⇧⌘V to create a vertical guide with the same technique.

There is also a preference (in the Guide panel) that changes this behavior slightly: the guide can be created at the current mouse position. This makes it very easy to create a new guide by pointing at an object and then using the keyboard shortcut.

Now that you have created some guides, you'll see these controls on each one:

guides
  1. Removes the guide
  2. Links the guide to another guide
  3. Adjust the guide position
  4. Displays the distance between guides
When you adjust the guide, you'll see a number appear—this is the guide's position in pixels measured from the top-left corner of the screen.

Linked guides (with the chain icon) will move together as a group. To link the guides, select one of the guides by clicking on its position icon. Then click on the chain icon of all the guides you want link to the selected guide. To unlink, click on the chain icon again.

After you've created all of your guides, you can save them in a file for later use. There are menu options, under Guides in the menu bar, that allow you to save and open guides. When you open a file with guides, you have an option to add them to the existing ones on screen. By default, the current guides will be removed before the new guides are loaded.

You can manually remove your guides one at a time using the icon shown above. There's also a menu item to remove all guides.

One final note before we move onto the next tool: you can easily toggle the guides on or off using the toolbar. Guides are useful when you are aligning objects, but can get in the way of design work. A quick toggle is all you need to get your screen back to normal.

Click on the home button to return to the index or proceed to the next tool: Frames.