Views on Vistaprint Pt. 2 - Even Vertical Space Distribution

This the second in our series of articles on how to get the best from the VistaPrint business card design tool. This time we'll be talking about how to take a group of objects, that need to be displayed at different heights, and distributing the vertical space between them evenly.

Evenly Distributing Vertical Space Between Objects

You may recall from the last article that we had a set of text boxes that had all been set to the same width but had different amount of vertical space between them. We'll start from there. It should be noted, to start with, that this tip is a little bit trickier than the previous technique. We will be doing things in what may appear to be a slightly odd way, so take care.

First, select the object which you want to be at the top of the group. Then move it so that its bottom sizing boxes exactly align with the bottom of the safe printing area, as in the illustration. Then move the object you want to be immediately below that so that its top sizing boxes exactly align with the bottom of the safe printing area, as shown.

Note that the controls are no longer horizontally aligned. This is fine so long as we have used the previous technique to give them all the same horizontal width. After we have evenly distributed the controls, we can re-align them by selecting them all and aligning them to the right or left and then moving them to any position we want.

Next, we need to select both of the controls and move them so that the bottom sizing boxes, of the bottom object, exactly align with the bottom of the safe printing area. Then move the third from top object so that its top sizing boxes exactly align with the bottom of the safe printing area, as in the illustration.

Again, note that the horizontal alignment of the objects is not significant at this stage.

We continue this procedure, selecting and moving an extra object each time, so that the bottom sizing boxes of the bottom object match the bottom of the safe area and then moving the next object so that it's top sizing boxes match the bottom of the area, as shown.

Still with us? Excellent because that's the hard part. All you need to do now is select all the objects, move them to a convenient position and align them to the left or right. It doesn't matter which, as, if you have followed the instructions from the previous article, all the objects will all be of the same width.

Refinements:

By now, you may well have noticed that this technique only allows you to position objects at a fixed vertical distance from each-other. To have different spacings, I suggest temporarily changing the font and text size so that the text boxes reset to a greater or lesser height, performing the procedure and then returning them to the desired font settings. You will probably have to experiment with different combinations of fonts and sizes to get the spacing you want but, having done this, you can vertically space your objects with exact precision. 

You may also find that, with larger fonts and text sizes, your text will run onto more than one line. In this case I suggest deleting sections of the text, before distributing the text boxes, and then restoring the full text after the objects have been properly positioned.

Next time, we'll talk about centring objects in the card and saving your designs as bitmaps.


[Edit 30/03/2013]
You can now download the Evenly Distributing Vertical Space Between Objects article as a printable PDF file.