Is there a way to align elements on the artboard in Adobe Illustrator, such as centering a group of objects into the direct center of the artboard?
I had originally posted this question on Photoshop Techniques, and found out a few workaround methods for doing this, but it seemed like there would be an easier way to do this, as it’s very simple to do in Photoshop (Select the layer or group of layers, and the background, and click “center”).
Purely by accident, I found out how to do this while working on a customer project at work. I was trying to align two objects along their left margin, and it kept pushing them to the left side of the document at the same time. I messed around with it, and it was actually aligning it to the artboard. It turns out, there’s a simple option, if you pull up the Align pallette. Click the flyout arrow on the Align pallette, and you’ll see an option for “Align to Artboard”.
This may have been something that was well-known, but I wasn’t aware of it, so I hope this can help someone else out there!
Great tip for the beginners. I’ve been using this one too.
Another technique I found that works is to manually center the object using the positioning slots in the top menubar. If your art board is 8 1/2 x 11 then highlight the object or group and then insert the values manually — 4.25 x, 5.5 y, pretty simple. This works nice if you want to have an object the same size as the artboard and are having trouble lining it up exactly or its off by a few hundredths. There is probably a better way to do all this I realize but this is what I’ve been doing and it seems to work.
It took me a while to figure out that you actually have to click the little art board icon next to the arrow. Thanks for the tip though.
Wow! Thank you Mark Oates!!! You just stopped the screaming……..
Ya I have read your comments.
But I have one more question. If you draw two rectangles (one big and one small) and if you want to align the small rectangle inside the big one i.e when you click align left it will align the small box inside the big withouth changing the postion of the big one. And also if you click align right it works too without changing the big rectangle postion. But when you click align center, it will change the postion of the big box rather than aligning it inside the big box.
So is there any way to align center (vertically or horizontally) the small box inside the big one with out changing the postion of the big one.
Thank you in advance
Henok,
First, disable “Align to Artboard”. Then select the two rectangles, and align their centers. That should work for you!
Man, I spent the whole night trying to get this. Thank you!!!!!!!!!!!
Thaxs man, that was very useful.
Thank you!
Thanks for blogging this tip. Blasted hidden features.
wow, thank you for this quick tip! i was looking how to do it for a long time, coz i’m used to work with macromedia freehand where there is a visible option on how to align an element to the center of the page.
thanks, kevin! :)
GREAT TIP!!! Saved me a lot of time.
Thank you! I’m still making the painful transition from Freehand to Illustrator and this helped a stack!!
Mine still doesn’t work. I click on the textbox, click on the artboard down arrow, click on align to artboard, and then click on the align to artboard icon. but nothing happens.
Help!
Twirl,
Are you clicking on the intended alignment button after you click the align to artboard button? Clicking the Align to Artboard button simply changes the reference point, so after you click it, click one of the buttons (such as left lalign, center, right align, distribute, etc.)
thank you for this!!! I have been using illustrator for a while and still seemed to overlook this feature somehow. I was making a box equal to the artboard size and lining guides up to the center of the box for center reference. I also found the nudge adjustment trick today as well. Always learning I guess
AWESOME! I’ve always been frustrated w/ this (I don’t use illustrator that often) – i don’t even know how to do it in photoshop. THIS IS AWESOME! TAHNK YOU!
Thanks for the tip! Finding the answer to my alignment problem here was much faster than with Illustrator’s help file.