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