- [Deke] In this movie, I'll show you

how to distribute selected objects

so that there's a specific amount of room

between each object and its neighbors.

And so you can see here in the final version of the artwork,

that we have an even amount of space

between each one of our squares, as opposed to having them

all absolutely adjacent to each other as they are now.

And that spacing is absolutely even

up here at the top of the first row,

between each one of the rows,

and down here at the bottom as well.

So in other words,

we have a total of one, two, three, four, five gaps

that we need to bear in mind.

All right, so I'll go ahead and switch over

to my document in progress.

You may recall that I made my artboard

100 points bigger than it was before.

And so if you take 100 and divid by those five gaps,

then you can anticipate that each one of the gaps

is going to be 20 points.

And so I'm going to start things off by selecting

all these squares, which I can do by going up

to the select menu and choose All on Active Artboard,

or you have that keyboard shortcut of Control + Alt + A

or Command + Option + A on a Mac.

And then I'll just go ahead

and drag this top left anchor point

until it snaps into alignment

with the top right corner of the artboard.

But for whatever reason, if I zoom in here,

you can see that that didn't quite work.

If that happens to you, then the most rock solid solution

is to bring up the transform panel

by clicking on the word transform

on the right side of the control panel,

then select this top point

in the small reference point matrix,

and notice your X and Y values.

In my case, the X value is zero points.

That's with respect to the artboard, by the way,

which is perfect.

However, my Y value is 2.827 for whatever reason.

So I'll just change it to zero as well,

and then press the Tab key.

And that goes ahead and moves the square

into exactly the proper location.

Now you may wonder, well, why didn't I just go ahead

and use my alignment functions right here

in order to, for example, switch this align icon

to align to artboard?

And then I could click on vertical line top.

Problem is that's going to move all those objects independently

with the exception of the grouped objects in the center.

So I figured just dragging the objects

was the better solution.

All right, I'll go ahead and press Control + Z

or Command + Z on a Mac to undo that move.

And now what we need to do is scoot the squares

20 points down and 20 points to the right.

And so with my black arrow tool selected,

I'll just go ahead and press the enter key

or the return key on a Mac

and I'll change both the horizontal

and vertical values to 20 points,

and I'll turn on the preview checkbox,

at which point, we'll see those guys

scoot into the proper locations.

All right, I'll go ahead and click okay

in order to accept that change.

Now, if you're really on the ball,

you could tell me that I wasted a little time there.

That wasn't the most efficient approach because after all,

we were just looking at the transform panel

and I could've just changed the X and Y values to 20 points.

In which case, good for you for noticing that.

All right, now what I want to do

is distribute these guys by a specific increment.

And I can do that by bringing up the full align panel.

And to make that happen,

go to the window menu and choose the align command,

which appears in my case over here

on the right-hand side of the screen.

And notice that we're seeing the six align icons

along with the six distribute icons.

If you're not seeing anything more,

then you need to click on this double arrow head

right next to the word align,

and that'll bring up the distribute spacing option.

Notice, however, that it's currently dimmed,

and that's because to make it available,

you have to select a key object.

And so I'll just go ahead and click on this top left square

in order to make it the key object, because after all,

it's the only one that's in the proper position.

And now, as you can see,

distribute spacing is available to me.

I'll go ahead and change this value here to 20 points

because that's the size of the gap,

and then I'll click horizontal distribute space.

And that's going to make an absolute disaster of things,

as you can see, I'll go ahead and zoom out here.

And the reason that this is happening

is because Illustrator is distributing

every single one of the squares

20 points away from its neighbor,

except for those four in the center,

and that's because they're grouped together.

What we need to do

is first group our squares in the columns,

and I'm going to do that by zooming back in

and I'll of course undo this mess.

And in order to make things work,

I'm going to have to ungroup these four squares in the center.

That doesn't mean you have to select them

independently of the other ones, by the way.

You can go up to the object menu

and choose the ungroup command

or press Control + Shift + G

or Command + Shift + G on the Mac

and that'll ungroup any groups inside the selection.

And so I'll go ahead and choose that command,

at which point I can now see the word rectangle

over here in the far left side of the control panel.

And that tells me that I no longer have any groups

because previously it would've appeared as mixed objects.

All right, now I'm just going to marquee

these four objects in the first row,

and I'll press Control + G

or Command + G on the Mac to group 'em.

And then I'll marquee this next column, press Control + G,

the third column, press Control + G,

and the fourth one, and then press Control + G,

and of course, that's Command + G on the Mac.

All right, now if I press Control + A

or Command + A on the Mac, to select everything,

and by the way, that is the wrong keyboard shortcut,

because I selected all these letters

on the second artboard as well.

Don't want that.

So what I need to do instead is go to the select menu

and choose All on Active Artboard

or press Control + Alt + A

or Command + Option + A on the Mac.

All right, now notice once again,

distribute spacing is dimmed.

And so what I need to do is establish a key object

by clicking on that top left square,

which is going to select the entire first group.

And then if I click horizontal distributed space,

I ended up getting the exact effect I'm looking for.

All right, now we're going to want to

vertically distribute the space,

but that means first grouping the squares into rows.

So I'll start off by going up to the object menu

and choosing ungroup, and that's going to ungroup

all four of the groups, by the way.

Then I'll marquee these top squares,

press Control + G or Command + G to group them.

The next row, group them.

The third row, group them.

And finally, the fourth row, followed by Control + G

or Command + G on a Mac to group them.

All right, now I'll just go ahead and marquee these guys

instead of selecting everything on the artboard.

And now notice, again,

this object is dimmed because we don't have a key object.

And in case that doesn't make sense, just think about it.

You have to tell Illustrator

which of these rows is supposed to be fixed in place

so it knows that the other rows

are the ones that are getting moved.

Now notice we have this align to option right there,

and you can switch it to align to key object.

In which case Illustrator is going to randomly

select a key object for you.

That's not the row I want, however.

So I'll just click on the top row,

which will both deactivate the bottom row

and set the top row as a key object, as you're seeing now.

After which point, go ahead and click

on vertical distribute space in order to move those rows

so that they're exactly 20 points apart.

After which point, I'll just go ahead

and click off the objects to deselect them.

And that's how you distribute selected objects

by a specific amount of space

using the distribute spacing options

down here at the bottom of the align panel.

(lively music)