Align moves the selected shapes so that an edge or a center of each one falls on a single line. It is the oldest tidying gesture in design: the compositor squaring a line of type in the stick, the draftsman sliding a T-square down the board. Here it acts on the shapes you drew, and their holes and folded pieces follow.
What it does
The ALIGN section appears on the Controls tab while the Move tool is in hand, because Move is the tool that selects. Select some shapes and press one of the seven buttons under ‘Align objects’. They sit in three groups:
- Left edges, horizontal centers, right edges slide shapes sideways only, so that the chosen edge or center of each lands on one upright line.
- Centers on both axes stacks every shape’s center on a single point.
- Top edges, vertical centers, bottom edges slide shapes up or down only, onto one level line.
The two-way switch beside the heading says what that line is measured against. With ‘Selection’, the line comes from the box that just encloses every selected shape. Align left edges and each shape moves to the leftmost edge among them; align horizontal centers and each moves to the middle of that box, which is not quite the same as the average of their centers. With ‘Sheet’, the line is the sheet’s own edge or middle, so ‘left edges’ puts every shape flush against the left side of the paper.
A single selected shape has nothing else to line up with, so it always aligns to the sheet, whichever way the switch is set. That makes centering one motif on the paper a two-click job: select it, press the centers button.
Three details are worth knowing.
- It measures the outlines you drew, not the pieces that folded out. Each piece is worked out afresh as the mirror of its hole, so alignment survives the fold in mirrored form: line up the top edges of three cuts that fold upward and their pieces, above the sheet, line up by their bottom edges.
- Moved shapes come to the top. As with a drag, a shape that moves is lifted above the others, so where it now overlaps another cut it is the one that takes the paper.
- One press, one step. The whole align is a single step for Undo, and a press that would move nothing adds no step at all.
The buttons stay grayed out until something is selected, and a line of text under them says what they will do with what you have chosen.
Why it works this way
The eye forgives loose arrangements and punishes near misses. A row of cuts that is almost level reads as a mistake; a row that is exactly level reads as a decision. Dragging to exactness is fiddly, and on a phone it is close to impossible. A button turns it into one press.
The choice between ‘Selection’ and ‘Sheet’ is the choice between shapes relating to each other and shapes relating to the page. In a notan the page matters more than usual, because its edges are the hinges that every piece folds over. A cut set a precise distance inside an edge lands exactly that distance outside it, so aligning to the sheet is also, quietly, aligning the pieces beyond it.
Measuring the drawn outline rather than the pieces follows every other move in the app. The outline is the one thing you made. The hole and the piece are consequences of it and of the paper around it, and they change shape when cuts overlap. Aligning a consequence would mean aligning something that shifts as soon as you touch it.
The metaphor
The metaphor is the straightedge, used the way a draftsman uses it. A T-square’s head rides against the edge of the drawing board, so every line drawn along its blade runs parallel to that edge; a set square resting on the blade gives the uprights. ‘Sheet’ is the T-square: the paper’s edge is the reference, as the board’s edge was. ‘Selection’ is closer to the compositor who squares a column against its own longest line.
Where the metaphor breaks: a straightedge helps you draw a line, but it never moves the work. These buttons carry the shapes to the line, instantly and exactly, and the centers button does it on both axes at once, which no ruler can.
A history
In art
Among the oldest alignment grids to survive are the Egyptians’. From the Middle Kingdom onward, painters and sculptors laid a grid of squares over a wall or block before drawing a figure; a standing figure measured 18 squares from the soles of the feet to the hairline. The grid did two jobs at once. It held proportions constant across a whole tomb of figures, and it let a figure be enlarged or reduced square by square.
Notan itself reached the West through a teacher who cared more about structure than subject. Arthur Wesley Dow, who took the idea from the scholar Ernest Fenollosa, published Composition in 1899 and taught that a picture is built from line, notan and color, put together into a harmony. Alignment is one of the quietest ways masses relate: shapes that share an edge seem to belong together even when they are far apart.
After the Second World War, Swiss designers turned that relation into a discipline, setting everything on a modular grid of columns and rows. Josef Müller-Brockmann’s Grid Systems in Graphic Design (1981) became its handbook. A grid is alignment decided in advance: every element meets lines that existed before anything was placed.
In printing
In a letterpress shop, alignment was not a matter of taste but of physics. The compositor set type letter by letter in a composing stick, a small tray whose adjustable end was fixed to the width of the column, the measure. Every line had to fill the measure exactly, made up with spaces and quads, the blank pieces of metal. The finished page was a slab of loose metal, locked into an iron frame called the chase with wooden furniture and expanding wedges called quoins. A short line would work loose on the press. Justified type is aligned at both ends because it had to be.
Color printing added a second kind of alignment: register. Each color was printed from its own plate, and the sheet had to meet each plate in exactly the same place, or the colors drifted apart at their edges. The small crosshair marks still printed at the corners of commercial sheets are there so that the press crew can check it.
In technology
Ivan Sutherland’s Sketchpad, the 1963 thesis program that let a person draw on a screen with a light pen, already let the user state relationships between parts of a drawing – constraints – and have the machine keep them. An align button is a one-shot version of the same idea: the relationship is applied once rather than enforced forever.
Desktop drawing programs made the buttons familiar. This section is modeled on the Align panel in Adobe Illustrator, down to the rule that a lone object aligns to the artboard. One Illustrator feature is left out: the ‘key object’ that stays put while the others come to it. Here the line comes from the whole selection’s box, or from the sheet.
In professional software
Every drawing and layout program has an align panel, and most work the way this one does: select, choose what to align to, press a button. Computer-aided design goes a step further and turns alignment into a rule the drawing keeps.
- Adobe Illustrator. ‘Window › Align’ (Shift+F7) holds the same edge and center buttons, and its ‘Align To’ menu offers ‘Align to Selection’, ‘Align to Artboard’ and ‘Align to Key Object’. For a key object, select everything, then click once more on the shape that should stay put: it takes a thick outline and the others come to it. Centering on both axes is two presses, horizontal center then vertical center.
- Adobe InDesign. Its Align panel, under ‘Window › Object & Layout › Align’, adds the references of page layout: besides the selection and a key object, you can align to the margins, the page or the spread.
- Figma. The alignment buttons are in the Design panel on the right. A single layer aligns to the frame that contains it, much as a lone shape here aligns to the sheet.
- Autodesk Fusion (formerly Fusion 360). In a sketch, alignment is a constraint rather than a move. The Horizontal/Vertical, Coincident and Midpoint constraints tie points and lines together, and the tie holds when you later drag or resize anything.
- Autodesk AutoCAD. Drafters align by snapping: object snaps, switched on and off with F3, catch endpoints, midpoints and centers as you move a shape. The
ALIGNcommand is a different idea. You pick pairs of source and destination points, and it moves and turns the object, and can scale it, so that the points meet.
What carries over. Before you press, ask what the line is measured against: the selection, one key object or the page. The same button gives a different result for each, and the setting is easy to overlook. The real difference is permanence. A button aligns once; a constraint in Fusion keeps aligning until you delete it.
Try this
- Draw one small shape anywhere, select it, leave the switch on ‘Selection’ and press the centers button. It still lands in the middle of the sheet.
- Cut three shapes near the top of the sheet, all folding up. Select them and align their top edges, then look above the sheet: the pieces now share a bottom edge.
- Align three shapes, then press Undo once. All three go back together.
Going further
Once shapes share a line, Distribute spaces them along it, and Transform moves them by exact amounts.
- Josef Müller-Brockmann, Grid Systems in Graphic Design
- Arthur Wesley Dow, Composition
- Robert Bringhurst, The Elements of Typographic Style