Alignment, Grouping, Object Colors, and More Editing Tools You’ve Been Underusing

Whether you’ve been creating visuals in VistaCreate for a while or just getting in the game, it’s vital to know the tools at your disposal well. All the editing tools make the creative process that much more efficient and productive, with less room for error. That means knowing your toolset well will help you make more professional-looking designs in smaller amount of time and much less effort!

Let’s take a look at some of the editing tools to help keep your designs looking professional and complete while giving you more freedom in customizing templates or creating designs from scratch.

Alignment

The tool is embodied in thin magenta lines that highlight you text or design element’s alignment with the items around it, as well as the center points of your whole design.

In order for the lines to appear, you need to move your design element within the template and once the alignment with any of the design elements is achieved, you’ll see the magenta lines.

This tool can help you keep your text in the middle of your design (make sure the text is center-aligned to ensure the magenta lines appear once the text box is aligned with a design center point). Alignment indicators can be also handy if you are trying to align two or more parallel elements of the design like the decorative thrills or lines on each side of your text or image.

Grouping

To simplify work with elements of your design that constitute a logical group, use the Group tool to turn them into a single element.

When all of your elements are connected into a single item, you can easily change size, orientation, transparency of your items, as well as move the group between layers of your design without the need to manually change those setting for each of the design elements of the group individually. That will save you both time and a bunch of pretty mundane actions!

Remember to ungroup your items to continue working with each of them individually. That’s also a good way to work with Text badges as they come as a grouped item and to change item color or type in your text, you need to ungroup them first:

Object colors

Take advantage of the option to change the colors of your text, borders, and other design elements within a template.

If you are adding Objects to your design, remember that you can change their colors as well:

Transparency

Another tool to add a little sophistication to your designs is item transparency. For this sample design, I swapped the original background with a night cityscape photo that is quite busy (for a background). The swap prompted the need to add more definition and dimension to my headline text. That’s why I decided to use a star-shaped object as a base for my text but it doesn’t work with the design as an opaque item:

By increasing object’s transparency I was able to effectively blend the item into my design:

Layers

Moving your text, design items and added objects between layers can be a useful tool that can create visual hierarchy within your design by moving some items forward and others – behind your top layers. Since we’ve just covered using layers in a separate blog post, I’ll just link it here for you to get back to it if you missed it.

In conclusion

Using the full set of image editing tools at your disposal is essential for producing sleek finished designs. Use alignment to ensure all your elements are neatly distributed around your visual, group items to quickly change size, transparency and layer position of several connected objects/text boxes, change object colors to fit the color palette of your design, and adjust transparency of items to allow for smoother fit of individual design elements.

If you want to learn more about VistaCreate design tools, check out these posts:

• Turn photos into motion with these simple design tips and tools
• A guide to simplifying content production for multiple social media profiles
• How to create an ebook in VistaCreate: Step-by-step
• Exciting new feature: Text frames