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This article is from September 24, 2009, and is no longer current.

Illustrator How-to: Distribute Art Around a Path

This tutorial is courtesy the Real World Illustrator blog.
Many designs call for distributing art along a path. And while Illustrator has some nice Align and Distribution tools, and even Smart Guides, they won’t help when you’re trying to align your objects to anything other than a straight line.
Enter the Blend feature — yes — the very same Blend feature that’s been in Illustrator since the beginning of time, when the main purpose for blends was to create shading or blends between colors (something we all use Gradients for these days). But blends are more powerful than people think. And more importantly, when you understand what makes a blend tick, you can use it for a variety of purposes, including distributing art along any path — even when that path isn’t straight.
Play the video below for the how-to details:

Distributing art around a circle in Illustrator from Mordy Golding on Vimeo.
You can find additional tutorials on my Vimeo page. For complete training titles on Illustrator and Flash Catalyst, head on over to Lynda.com.

  • Anonymous says:

    This is a very useful technique you show here… And I will absolutely use this.

    What you could do to finalize this if you are a “total perfectionist” is – Expand appearance on the element – Ungroup it – Select the “thirteenth” star and simply hit “delete” to get rid of the overlapping star.

    This way you have the twelve stars aligned in the circle, but you don’t have the circle element nor the thirteenth star.

    Just some extras….

  • Anonymous says:

    Hey Thanks for share this awesome Tut Edel Los Angeles

  • Anonymous says:

    Thanks a lot! Needed to finish a logo for a band but with dots instead of stars. Very helpful!

    Cheers

  • Anonymous says:

    Dear Mordy,
    Thank you for the EU flag tutorial. What if I wanted to have the stars (or whatever art) rotate individually as they followed the new spine?
    Thanks
    Julie, Key Largo

  • Anonymous says:

    It a great tutorial bit I was wondering if you could make the same effect with a rasterized image (placed from Photoshop)?

    Thanks,

  • Anonymous says:

    Thx for pointing out. Blend seems to distort my oval object.

  • Anonymous says:

    Thanks a lot – really usefull tutorial!

  • Anonymous says:

    Thank you so much for doing this video. I love how you get straight to the point and you explanation was clear and easy to understand! THANK YOU!!!

  • Anonymous says:

    Perfect, thanks

  • Anonymous says:

    This was so helpful, thank you!

    You know how at the end you have two of the stars layered on top of each other? Is it possible to avoid that?

  • Gizem says:

    Thanks !

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