March 2014 Tips and Tricks-- Guiding Your Way

[Barbara B]

Guiding Your Way: A Look at Guidelines, Guide Objects and Guide Layers



When is the last time you needed a diagonal guide in Xara? Have you ever wanted a colour guideline other than red? Especially when you’re working on a red drawing!? This month, Frances Proctor takes you through the versatility and accommodating features of Xara’s Guides layer and features. Get on track now! Then show us how you use of guides and guide objects as foundations for your work.

[csehz]

Frances thanks for the tips, the Guides are maybe not the most spectacular elements in the program, but exactly that is why can be overlooked and definitely worth to read.

I learnt actually from your article that

- how to Create guide layer from Page & Layer Gallery, just knew the switching on the rulers method
- how to set Precise location on the page in Layer properties, that is really great
- how to change the color of the guide lines, sometimes felt that would be worth to change, but naturally never went into Layer properties to perceive the option there Anyway it is quite much logical being there

[Gare]

Great show, Frances!

By the way, if I might add to this topic, I frequently put a poorly designed character from a typeface on the Guides layer. By default, snap-to is enabled, and this allows me to re-trace the character with fewer control points and more smoothness. It might sound counter-productive, but you really can retain the artistic sense of the character while cleaning it up, when the snap-to guide objects are there for you.

Keep up them tips, Frances, thanks!

This is a community board and I'm just the host!

My Best,

Gary

[angelize]

Thanks guys!

@ stygg I'm glad you learned from this.

The tutorial touched on contours and blends, but I've since discovered that contours do transfer to the guides layer with all steps intact, and the contour is fully editable on the guides layer. Blends can be forced by converting your blend to editable shapes first. When doing this your blend becomes a group and all the steps in your blend become editable shapes. You can create some complex guides this way.

Here are a couple of examples. The one on the right was done with a blend of ellipses and a spiral then it was converted to editable shapes and the spiral was removed and the group was moved to the guides layer. I couldn't help but think of Masque's snails when doing this one.