When I design something, I like it to be by the numbers. What I mean by that is when I want a design element to be one inch from the edge of my piece, I want it to be at 1.000" and not at 1.0625" or 0.9375".
A sixteenth of an inch can matter a lot, especially when creating folding pieces or dielines of pieces that will cut out. So placing color breaks, images or lines exactly where I want them on a piece is important to me. (And it will be important to your printer down the line if there are tricky folds in your design piece.) Creating guides along an exact measurement will facilitate neat, workable projects.
Guides created in InDesign automatically select and have a measurement in the toolbar above the page. From there it is easy to see where exactly your guide is and even easier to type in a number in the measurement box to get your guide precisely where you want it.
But Illustrator has a default setting that discourages knowing where exactly the guide has landed.
Below, in Illustrator, I dragged a guide from the vertical ruler on the side, over to the 1 inch mark. But is that guide really at 1 inch?
To be able to tell where (to a ten thousandth of an inch!) your Illustrator guide is, first you need to go to the View Menu, go down to Guides, and then to the Lock Guides. The default for this is ON (a checkmark). While this in and of itself is not inherently evil, it stops me from knowing where exactly my guides are. Highlight "Lock Guides" to turn it off for the moment.
Below is what you want this menu to look like to proceed:
You are also going to need the Transform palette open on your work space. Go to Window and then down to Transform to activate it if it isn't already on your screen. See below.
Now that Lock Guides is off, and your Transform palette is open, use the selection tool (the black arrow, keyboard shortcut: v) and drag over the guide.
Once selected, the guide will turn a different color. On my computer, the unselected guide is cyan (above), the selected guide is blue (below). Also, the transform palette will go from gray inactive fields (above) to white active fields (below).
Since the previous pictures show the Transform palette at an extremely small size, below is a close up. Once the guide is selected, the Transform palette shows us that the guide is actually at 1.0069 inches. Highlight this number (see below) and type in a 1 and hit enter/return to nudge the guide over to 1.0000 inch.
That's all it takes. Once your guides are in place, you can turn "Lock Guides" back on. That way you can be certain that the guides are exactly where you want them and that nothing will accidentally shift them as you work on your vector art. Thus, you can sleep tonight knowing for certain that your guides in Illustrator are precise and "on the numbers."
