Quick Tip: Snap to pixels on Adobe Illustrator

Sep 16th/2010

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From now on, we will be posting new design tips every week that will help you improve your skills and get more confident with your designs. On today’s tip, we’re going to show you how to use the snap to pixels property in Adobe Illustrator.
Snap to pixels is that it lets you work with crispy objects, which means that they don’t have blurred shadows or pixels around them.

First you need to create a new document and check the box that says “Align New Objects to Pixel Grid”, that will activate the snap to pixels quality.

Then we you start drawing, go to View and select Pixel Preview, if you zoom in you will actually be able to notice the pixel grid.

You can activate or deactivate the snap to pixels property whenever you want, you just need to uncheck / check the Align to Pixel Grid option within the transform window.

The previous screenshot shows you how an object looks when it does not have the snap to pixels property activated, that is only realizable at closer look, we are looking at 3200 % on that picture.

And this is how our object looks with snap to pixels activated, a perfect limited shape that goes well aligned with the pixel grid.

That’s it, we hope you can find this tip helpful, now you can work with pixel art objects directly on Illustrator and create sharpen objects that work perfectly on digital devices, it’s important to state that this property does not affect illustrations that are destined for printing, please come back to find our next daily tip, enjoy the rest of your day.