 Hi, and welcome to Adobe Absolute Beginners Adobe Illustrator CC. My name is Wes Holing, and I'm going to be showing you some of the basic tools and tips for how to use Adobe Illustrator CC. The next thing to show is Alignment and the Pathfinder tool. I'm going to create a couple of extra shapes just like I have before. So I'll create a square, and I'll make that red with a black stroke, and I'll create a smaller circle about that big, and I'll just make it blue so you can tell the difference. So if I want to get these objects to align in a certain way, either relative to each other or relative to the canvas itself, or the artboard as it's called in Illustrator, I can do that very easily without having to drag and just kind of eyeball it. So if I select my square, over here on the right I have the Align tool. And you have a lot of options here, Aligning the objects, Distributing them, all that. But I'm going to start here on the bottom right. I have two options in this case. I can align to the selection which is only the square that's not going to do me any good, or I can align it to the artboard which might be more useful. So that's already selected. And if I choose the center one here, Horizontal Align Center, I click that, it's right in the center vertical, excuse me, horizontally for the artboard. And the same is true vertically too. If I want a vertically aligned center that's just over on the right, I can click that. Now it's in the direct center of the entire artboard. Same is true for top, left. I can do it any way I want. So let's return it to the center. And the same is true for the circle. If I choose that and put it on the left or on the top, I can put it in the center, whatever I need to do. It's very handy. Now if I choose both by holding down the Shift key and clicking the other object with the Shift key held down and using the selection tool, I come back to Align to. Now I've got a third option and it's key object. And I'll show you that in a moment. But first let's try selection. You can see that nothing happens when I choose Horizontal Align Center. These are both horizontally aligned already. If I choose the vertical, now they're aligned vertically to each other but not to the entire artboard. This is great if you have two things that you need to align relative to one another but not to the entire piece of art. And I'm going to undo that. So now that they're still separate, and I can come back to Align to and choose Align to Key Object. This is a tricky one, but once I've chosen it you can see there is now a thicker color around the circle. Illustrator will by default choose the latest object that you've drawn or added to be the default. And you can choose whichever default you want. So if I wanted to align that circle to this square, I click the square. They're both still selected but now it knows that the square is the dominant object. And so when I choose vertically aligned center it aligns that circle to this square. And if I undo I can show you the opposite. I'll choose Key Object again. It's on the circle like it was before. And now I'll choose Vertical Align Center. And now it brings the square to the circle. This is very handy if you've got multiple objects and you need them to line up either on the left side, the right side, the center, whatever you need. Next I'll also show you the Path Finder. So let's go ahead and select both of those and I'll bring them back to the center. Oops. Let's choose the artboard first. Now they're centered. And I'll bring this circle to the right by clicking and dragging it. So if I want to take a chunk out of this square, very easy to do, I can align an object, in this case the circle. You can just draw a new object that you need to take out of another object, whatever you need. And I'll line it up and I'll select them both and come over here on the right to the Path Finder tool. I've got a lot of options here and you may not use all of these on a regular basis. There are a few that I tend to use very regularly. In this case I'm going to use the second one here. This is the minus front. So as you can see on the artboard I have a circle in front of a square. You can tell it's in front of it because it's not hidden by the square. The square is partially hidden by the circle. So once I've selected them both I can choose minus front. And now I have a square that has just a half circle taken out of it. The circle is completely gone. That object has been deleted and it's removed the portion that was overlapping the square. Now if I undo that I can choose a different option. Let's choose Unite. Now I've got two objects that are overlapping. If I click it now I've got one object. There's no distinction between the square and the circle anymore. It is now just one single object. And it's blue because it took on the color and stroke of the front most objects. I can undo that. And let's try, this is another one that I tend to use a lot, Divide. Click that and that doesn't look like much has happened. What it's done is it's divided both objects along any place that they intersect and it turns and then it groups all of the objects. If I come up to the Object menu and Ungroup, now if I click on anything else on the canvas I've got this object. I've got this object and this object. They all intersect along certain points and Illustrator divided them all up evenly. This is great if you want to take part of an object out or divide them all up and then combine certain parts later you can do that. But the Pathfinder is very, very useful for creating shapes and then manipulating them later.