New Feature: Guide Mode Setting
Jun 26, 2024 | Written by
Cameron McEfee
The latest releases of GuideGuide for Figma, InDesign, and Illustrator have a new feature that will give you more control over your guides: a guide mode setting.
Each of these have multiple types of guides. The names differe between the apps, but generally they can add guides either to an inner (constrained) or outer (full document) context.
By default, GuideGuide adds guides to the inner context when the current selection fits inside it, and to the outer context if not. With this new setting, you can choose the context where your guides are added, or leave it auto as before.
Illustrator guide improvements
Illustrator is slightly different, in that it doesn’t actually have a concept of a “Guide” but rather it has paths that can be guides. This means that the concept of a guide is arbitrary and up to decide.
Prior to these releases, GuideGuide’s behavior was to render guides in the current artboard, constrained to the artboard boundaries. Anyone that has tried to work outside of an artboard will agree this was awful.
In the new versions of GuideGuide for Illustrator, guides will now fit to the artboard by default, but will stretch across the document when the selection is outside of the artboard. As an added bonus, I’ve added a “Selection” guide mode where the guides will be rendered to the exact size of the selection.
The other apps
Photoshop technically has “canvas” and “artboard”. However, these are generally mutually exclusive, so I’ve opted to omit the setting. Additionally, Sketch only has one style of guide, so the setting is also omitted there.
How to use it
To use the new setting, launch one of the apps where it appears. Then:
- Click the Settings button.
- Scroll until you see “Guide Mode”.
- Choose the option that suits your needs.
See the documentation for more info. I hope you find it useful.