Align By and Align To separate per object aligned
Current alignment in Illustrator is barely sufficient. I should be able to align any object or path by any point to any object or path by any point.
Perhaps if you created an alignment tool that allows us to select not only the alignment objects, but the points for each object to align by then your alignment methods would be so much more robust.
Using the align tool would create a list of alignment participants on a slide-out panel. When selecting an element to align, you would pick from one of the 9 reference points or click anywhere on the object to create a custom alignpoint. Then when you were done selecting elements, you would pick the alignment method (align Horizontal) and all of those elements would be aligned by the point you selected. What's more is that you could save this "alignment strategy" to realign those elements by those reference points later using a simple action. Hit me up for more details on this if you are interested.
Think of an alignment point as the alignment equivalent of a transform point with 9 positions.
Jason Burnett
shared this idea
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Yep, waiting for a demo then. It’s somewhat clear, but, as always, a bunch of even simple images would help.
Some of these things you describe are doable with specific plugins and scripts... but none can permanently assign specific alignment pivots.Plus this reminds me of this more narrow request about Alignment groups: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657/suggestions/35643463 — for some things within a group to be ignored when aligning.
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Simple.
You create a series of symbols that have different sizes. You know you want the instances of the symbols aligned in this manner:
All instances of symbol A belong on the left side of the artboard, but aligned to the right and distributed vertically.
All instance of symbol B belon on the right side of the artboard, but aligned to the left and also distributed vertically.So you have a bunch of instances of Symbol a in various sizes and treatments and the same for Symbol B. Setting up this alignment strategy once makes it foolproof in the future. Resize the content of a Symbol A and your entire layout is ruined. Start from scratch grabbing all the Symbol As and align/distribute. Or press Play on that alignment strategy and watch all symbols As get selected and aligned then all Symbol B's do the same. Voila. Tons of work saved.
Also, think of alignment strategies like graphic styles. You setup your forms so that your labels are aligned right and the square for the input is aligned left.
You do hundreds of these fields when you hear that what they would prefer is to have your field labels aligned left, on top of the square for the input.
Normally, you would have to go through hundreds of changes. With an alignment strategy, you change the details of the alignment so that [labels] alignby Bottom Left to [fields] by top left with a 5px gap. Press apply and your entire form is modified instantly. Save that as a new strategy and flip back using the old strategy in a mouse click.
Part of the proposal I am working on also allows for property sorting in alignment strategies. So imagine you have an infographic with lots of different sized elements. Those elements are sized according to their popularity. An alignment strategy could align all of the elements distributing the space between them vertically, but sorting them by size automatically. All the tiny ones up top, big ones below.
You get a bunch of new images you have to add and rather than manually inserting the images and fudging the alignment, you simply select all of the images and apply the alignment strategy--boom they are sorted, distributed and aligned. Hours of work saved.
There are lots of other details to this idea that I am hoping someone at Illustrator will listen to one day. I've been working on it for a long time and It's pretty close to being presentable. Just need to get some figma stuff fixed for demo.
Thanks for listening. -
I wonder what workflow or task requires a method like this? Why realigning some object later again? Just curious.
