TIL it took me 6 hours to fix a 2 minute alignment issue in Illustrator

Honestly, I spent all last Saturday trying to figure out why my print file had this tiny gap between two colored shapes. I kept zooming in and out, adjusting the anchor points, moving things pixel by pixel. After about 4 hours, I was ready to just trash the whole project and start over. Then I realized I had the snap to grid setting off the whole time. Turned it on, moved the shape 2 pixels, and it lined up perfectly in 2 minutes flat. Felt like a total idiot for wasting an afternoon on that. Has anyone else had a print design problem that took way too long to fix because of a simple setting you forgot to check?

2 comments

2 Comments

the_sage4d ago

Oh man, that snap to grid thing gets me every time. But here's something I noticed that nobody really talks about - sometimes the issue isn't even a setting you forgot. It's that your document was created from a weird template or someone else's file that had corrupted anchor points or random clipping masks hiding in the layers. I've opened files from clients where the alignment looked fine on my screen but printed all wonky because there was a hidden compound path messing with the bounding box. So maybe it wasn't totally your fault, the file itself could have been fighting you the whole time without you knowing.

the_diana4d ago

@the_sage nailed it with the hidden stuff. Worked with a print shop where their templates always had invisible shapes that threw off everything. You'd copy the artboard size and it would still be off by a millimeter because there was a stray point somewhere. Drives me crazy how often people save files with random hidden crap in them. Always worth hitting that "select all" and looking at the layers panel before you start working on something from someone else.