Illustrator: Align objects without moving one of the objects

So you have a business card built in Illustrator and you want to center the text on the card. If you select the 3.5″ x 2″ box and the text box and click “Vertical Align Center” on the Align palette, Illustrator will move each object halfway towards the other object!

If you want only to move the text and not the 3.5″ x 2″ box, you will need to make the 3.5″ x 2″ box the “key object.” To do this, select both objects, then click the 3.5″ x 2″ box (not a Shift+click though). This will align all the other objects to the “key object” you just clicked.

–Stephen M. James
www.smjdesign.com

27 Comment so far

Great i was just trying to do this, and found your site, thanks.

- Jon 05/18/08

Fantastic thanks.

- Angus 10/30/08

Yes! been looking for ages for this. Why didn’t i google for it before

- steven 01/20/09

Thank you! I was going crazy with the alignments!

- Ana 02/03/09

Thanks. This is so helpful. I was doing a whole of workarounds just to align 2 shapes!

- Vasilis 06/07/09

Woa. Been looking for this for quite a while. Thanks!

- Almo! 06/24/09

shit, it was so simple thank you

- wtk 06/26/09

Masterfully done! Thanks so much.

- cahbreis 09/28/09

Thanks for this, been beating my head at it for like 20 minutes. See, good deeds don’t go un-noticed. Thanks for your help, sir.

- Todd Wiseman 10/04/09

Great tip! Saves lots of frustration.

But why is there no indication of how this works (or which object is the key object, even after you have selected one) in the interface? (at least not version 10. I understand that is really old, so maybe newer versions have some visual indication of this)

- Arvid 10/19/09

So much of Adobe Illustrator feels like arcane hand magic… Thanks for the demystification!

- Rolando 10/26/09

Awesome! I’ve been struggling with this for so long. Thanks!

- Sydyh 11/11/09

You’d be amazed how many times I googled this and found nothing before I just tried the plain English phrase “center align without moving one object”. THANK YOU!

- Mark 02/23/10

thanks!!

- the illest 04/08/10

I swear I was going go find a bridge. In photoshop 7.0 it’s very easy, the first object you select automatically serves as “key object” – I almost thought that Adobe decided to get rid of that feature. Great that I came across your post.

- Dima 04/27/10

THANK YOU SO MUCH!!!!

- dre 08/02/10

Great! Thanks for preventing headaches!

- wasser 08/30/10

Thank you very much! This was starting to drive me insane.

- M109RRIDER 09/27/10

Well done, sir! You know, just proves that it’s helpful to review the docs, even after using the same software for 20 years…

Select the objects to align or distribute. To align an anchor point on the object, use the Direct Selection tool and select the anchor point.
In the Align panel or Control panel, do any of the following:
To align or distribute relative to the bounding box of all selected objects, click the button for the type of alignment or distribution you want.
To align or distribute relative to one of the selected objects, click that object again (you don’t need to hold down Shift as you click this time). Then click the button for the type of alignment or distribution you want.
Note: To stop aligning and distributing relative to an object, choose Cancel Key Object from the Align panel menu.