- [Voiceover] In this movie, I wanna go over smart guides
and explain to you why it's important when it comes
to the context of creating logo design.
Smart guides can be found in Illustrator
if you go to preferences, you can go to the smart guides tab
and if we open that up, you can see it gives you
the opportunity to set the color, so when it's activated
on screen, it can be a specific color.
I like having it set to light grey.
You can have it activate alignment guides.
This is if you're doing like 90 degrees
or 45 degrees and you're trying to keep the continuity
everything matched up, you can use that.
I usually have that set off unless I need that specifically.
One of the nicer features they've added recently
is spacing guides.
But smart guides enable quick building and precise building.
And I'm gonna show you why that is right now.
So this is my thumbnail sketch for a graphic motif
for a logo design.
Now, as I'm starting to build it,
I've created this shape.
Now the reason why I use smart guides
is if I hover over this path, I have smart guides
turned off right now,
and when I do that, there is no tactile feedback
in terms of the cursor going over the path.
It doesn't feel like there's anything there.
Even though this little icon changes.
I'm not guaranteed that I'm right on the path.
And it's not gonna snap to that specifically.
And if I go over an anchor point,
you can see it's saying yes, there's an anchor point here
but once again, it's not a guarantee that it's gonna snap.
If I turn on smart guides, command U, we do that now,
when I hover over a path, it says, hey, you're on the path.
Not only are you on the path,
but we're locked onto the path.
It gives you tactile feedback where you know
you're exactly where you need to be.
And the same thing when you have an anchor point.
You're gonna see a couple other benefits
to using smart guides as we go ahead and produce
the artwork for this design.
So what i wanna do first is I'm gonna start here
by snapping to this anchor point,
and I'm just just gonna draw out
a rectangle shape showing here.
Using the rectangle tool.
And now, with smart guides enabled, I only want
my wings to go out as far as I have this guide here.
So we'll use the direct selection tool
to select just these anchors.
And then I'll go and you can see it says intersect.
It says you're right exactly where the guide is.
So that's what we want.
So that's a nice thing to do there.
Now, one other aspect that I like to do when I'm building,
specifically if I need a certain angle,
here's a quick little tip that I use a lot.
Is I'll select a path, a segment,
so this is a whole path right here that makes up
this bird shape.
But I just want this path right here.
So what I'm gonna do, using the direct select tool,
I'll just click on this segment of the path,
and then I'm gonna go command C, command F,
command C, command F, and you see what it does
is it just clones that one path.
And with this selected, I can select this path,
bring it over here, snap it to this one,
and now I have the angle of what I want the wings to be
on this side and it matches the angle shown over here.
So I'll use that method as I'm creating.
And in this case, I'm gonna modify this shape
by dragging it over,
and once again, smart guides tells me right when
I'm on that correct path, that correct angle
and then I can stop.
So that's how I use those two methods.
Once again, I'm gonna switch the graphic style
just so I can see it.
And now with that, I can just clone this shape,
command C, command F,
and with this shape cloned, I can just select
this anchor point, slide it down,
snap it right to the bottom of this one.
And I know it's right where it goes.
Now, over here, if I select this path,
you can see this is a little off.
So I'll drag this anchor point over.
Slide it until it snaps to that path.
Then it actually tells me I'm over the anchor path
but it also gives me that tactile feedback
where you know it's snapping.
You know it's right where it should be.
And this is where I'll take this shape again
and I'll just copy it.
Command Z, command V to paste.
I'll select the two top shapes here.
And I'm gonna group 'em really quickly
just so they're one shape.
Select this wing.
And then I'm gonna go to align.
And I'm gonna focus on these two shapes
and I'm gonna align it going horizontally here.
And this ensures that it's right in the middle,
right where it needs to be.
Then with smart guides, I can drag it over,
snap it here.
Now I can get rid of this path that I was just using
as guide for my vector building.
So this is how quickly it can go.
And once you get to this point,
I can just select all my shapes, go to pathfinder,
click on unite and you can see how it just
fuses everything together.
Now I like to clean up my art as I'm going along.
So I'll select these two anchor points that I don't need.
And I'll just remove 'em using this tool up here
in the menu bar.
We'll just click it and it removes those anchor points.
And so it's good to get in the habit of doing that
because the more optimized
you can make your art, the better.
Now, there's one tool that I'm show you right now
that in another movie we'll go into it more in depth
and I'll show you both how to do it natively
in Illustrator but also how to use a plug in to do it
as well because I think the plug in once again,
works a lot better.
And that's a rounding tool.
And by default, I have my rounding turned off
in Illustrator because it gets in the way
of vector building at certain zoom ratios.
You go to click an anchor point,
you'll accidentally hit the corner widget instead.
So I like to use a dynamic rounding,
so if I turn this on, you can see the dynamic rounding
is here and we have the round fillet selected.
And I have the tool selected over here in the menu bar.
And the reason why I like using this
is 'cause I can just click on any anchor point
and just immediately start adjusting it.
So I don't want this one to be too big,
so that looks, you know what, maybe a little bigger,
something like that looks okay.
Once I set one, I want all the wings to be the same,
and this is the nice feature of it.
I can just click the corners on those,
I don't have to pull 'em out, it just knows
that's the last one I used, and I can apply it that quickly.
So that's why I use it.
It's a really nice feature, it works really well.
Once I have this composed like this,
I can now go back and color the black and white artwork
so you can see that here.
And if we zoom out, I can show you what the final
design look like.
So that's how I'll use smart guides to assist in my building
of a logo design.
You're gonna use this a lot
if you're doing shape building techniques.
When it comes to other features
like organic free form shapes,
it's also good gonna assist you
in that respect as well.
But you'll have to toggle 'em on and off.
Once again, it's command U,
and you'll wanna toggle 'em on and off as you build
because sometimes it'll force the anchor point
to snap to something.
You don't always want that.
So if you know what that keyboard command is,
you can easily just toggle it off when you don't need it.
Then when you need it, toggle it back on.
So I use smart guides every day on almost
every project to help me produce my art precisely
and more efficiently.
Once you get in the habit of using smart guides,
you'll fully understand how valuable they are
and how best they work for your process.
But that said, you'll find the need to toggle them
on and off as I stated, because they can get in the way
but if you get in the habit of using 'em,
you're gonna see a drastic improvement
in the precision of your art and the ease at which
it'll help you to build your art.