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How to make a grid in Illustrator in 2 Easy Ways

In this article, I will show you How to make a Grid in Adobe Illustrator. One cool thing about Illustrator is that it comes with its own inbuilt Grid. The grid is however not visible on the default view.

To view the in-built grid, go to View> Show Grid. The default Grid will come up all over the document. To make it useful, you can customize it to your preferred settings.

In MAC, you can do this by going to the top Illustrator menu, then there is a guides and grid option. On PC this option is under Edit>Preferences>Guides and Grids. The default setup is a grid line after every 72 pixels.

How to make a grid in Illustrator

4 subdivisions mean that after every 100/4 that is 25 pixels is a line to subdivide. Set this to your preferred settings.

The color option is also important. Choose a color that contrasts your work. Grids will appear on the back but if you uncheck Grid on the back it will be on top of your artwork.

You can play around with these settings to what suits you best. To effectively start designing with a grid, I recommend you set your points to snap to the grid. Therefore, the grid will guide your sizing and artwork proportions. 

To do this go to view>snap to Grid. If you create a shape or path even out of the grid alignment, it automatically snaps to your grid.

How to make a grid in illustrator Using the Grid Tool

If you want to draw a grid, you can use the Illustrators Grid tool. Click and hold the line segment tool to bring up the grid tool. After selecting it, click once to bring up a menu.

You can set a number of things including width, Height, dividers, etc. If you add a fill and stroke, you will create a grid that you can use in your workflow.

To use them just lock and you can use them to align your work. To edit them, go to Window>Appearance and change anything you wish.

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