Let’s say you are drawing a deck of cards. The four sevens all have seven widgets laid out in a particular pattern. Is there a way that I can create this layout once (say with spades), then save it as a template of some sort, then use it to automatically create the identical cards for hearts, diamonds, and clubs?
I’m using Illustrator CS2.
You can certainly put guides at the correct positions (X & Y) for each object, and then snap your symbols to the guideline intersections. You could also put all of your numbers on a different layer, and just drop the different suits on top of it.
Ah, custom guide lines. Good idea. I had been working with the default grid lines.
Hmmm…how do I make custom guides? I see the Guides submenu under View, but the “Make Guides” option is grayed out.
Just click in the ruler and drag a guide onto the page.
Rad. You are my hero.
While you can do this with guides and illustrated versions of the suit symbols, if you use the suit symbols that are part of a font, you can just find and replace them as text instead…
The question has been well-answered, but I thought I’d add a little lagniappe info for an implied question above: Make Guides will be greyed out unless you have a drawing element selected. What it does is turn the element into a guide. This allows you to have a guide that is a circle, or a triangle, or a stick-figure, or a line portrait of your mom. Whatever you need.
I’m actually making my own suit symbols, otherwise I would have done that.