3.4 Using the Guides Manager

Hi, and welcome back to Affinity Designer Quickstart. In this lesson, we're gonna talk about the guides manager. Now, you can drop guides into your Affinity Designer document to help you with layout. And the way that you do it, is the same as you've probably done in other applications. You just place your cursor out on one of the rulers, and then, you drag you, go out to the position that you want it. But you'll notice that as I'm dragging this guide out, I'm actually able to drop it down at a decimal point rather than a whole rounded point. And if you are working with web design, or something that needs to be pixel perfect, then you want to be able to make sure that you know, God's a down exactly where you need them to at this document for example is 1400 points wide or 1400 pixels wide. Now, if I want to A 1200 pixel wide layout. Then, I need to drop this guide down at 100 points. But with these decimals coming in to where I can drop these guides, it can be a little tricky for me to put this guide exactly where I need it. So this is where the guides manager is very, very helpful. So if we head up to View. We can then choose the Guides Manager,and this shows that the guide we have down right now, is at this point here. And we can just edit that figure, and change it to the 100 point value that we need. And now, we can also put in a second guide by hitting this little button here, to add a new guide. And we can set that, to the 1,300 value that we need, in order to create a 1,200 pixel wide or point wide layout. We can do the same thing with horizontal guides. So, we can set a gutter at the top of our layout, say of 50 points, and then in the same sense, we can also delete any of these guys that we need to by hitting the little delete buttons down the bottom. As well as using explicit values, we can also use percentage-based values. So now, rather than having a 100 points and 1300 points, we've got percentage-based values. And then, we can change those to anything we like, as well. So, we might have a layout that is 80% the width of the entire page by entering values of 10% and 90% for our two guides. So, that is how you can easily put guides in exactly where you need them to be for whatever type of layout you're creating. In the next lesson, we're just going to cover a really quick tip on how you can rearrange studio panels in Affinity Designer. I'll see you there.