Getting used to Illustrator’s Smart Guides is important. The Align tools are nice, but you’re eventually going to want to line things up in some way that you can’t do with the Align tools. That’s where Smart Guides come in to play. They are invaluable for lining things up exactly. Smart Guides became my best friend when I started doing a lot of packaging design. Here are a few Smart Guide basics.

Start by opening a new file and turning your Smart Guides on. Go to View > Smart Guides or use the keyboard shortcut Command/Control U.

Draw a few simple shapes (circles, squares, etc.). With your Smart Guides on, roll over the shapes you drew. You’ll notice the lines highlight and words like anchor, path and center appear. Take note, I enlarged the words in the image below for demonstration purposes. They won’t actually be that large.

The purpose of all those words (anchor, path and center) is to know when you are over a particular area on the shape. Path means your mouse is over a line, center means you’re over the center of the circle and anchor means you’re over an anchor point. If you click on the path, center or anchor you can drag the shape to a new place. If you cross over another shape while you are dragging it, the word intersect will appear. This means that your shape is lined up with another shape. Practice lining shapes up along anchor points, center points and along the edges.

That is the basics of the Smart Guides. Hopefully, they’ll come in handy for you. You can find more of my tutorials here.