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.
This article was last modified on January 18, 2023
This article was first published on September 24, 2009