The Alignment tab in Shutterstock Create is a useful tool to become acquainted with, as it’ll be an integral part of all your designs! This palette quickly aligns and distributes your shape, text, and image layers within a canvas.
Quite simply, the first three icons allow you to align your elements horizontally—or left, center, and right, respectively. The second three icons organize your layers vertically—or at the top, middle, and bottom of the canvas.
You can simply hover over each icon to see their function and experiment with each. If you make a mistake, use the Undo and Redo buttons from the bottom toolbar for a quick fix.
Align Individual Text and Shapes
What’s important to note is that the Alignment tool is designed to ensure all of your design components are symmetrically placed throughout the canvas.
In addition to these alignment options, you’ll also have the help of red alignment lines. They’ll show up once you begin dragging elements on the canvas (as shown below). Consider it your own little design helper!
Objects of any kind can be organized with the Alignment tool. When aligning individual elements inside Create, it can feel tricky to eyeball whether or not something actually is aligned.
To align more than one element to the document, click on each shape while holding down the Shift key.
Once you do this, you’ll notice that familiar Group layers tab pop up from the top toolbar. This groups multiple shapes or text and treats it as a single object.
Align the grouped objects to the canvas for a symmetrical appearance.
Align Multiple Design Elements
The Alignment tool will align elements to each other, instead of to the canvas, when selecting two or more separate layers. The bounding boxes of the larger text box or shape act as reference points for alignment instead of the document.
You can achieve similar results when aligning separate grouped objects to each other. Select two or more individual groups with the Shift key and click the Alignment tool to organize accordingly.
Aligning shape and text layers not only improves your creative workflow, but also increases the quality of your designs.
Fully grasp the world of alignment by experimenting with different shapes and text layers in your own designs with Create to see how this practical tool can achieve effortless results.
Interested in taking full advantage of Shutterstock Create’s tools and assets? Check out these simple design tutorials:
License this cover image mockup via Krakenimages.com and Bibadash.
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