Align & distribute icons in Illustrator for web design

Hello, UI designers. What we're going to do now is get these icons just kind of aligned nicely, and balanced in these columns. Alright, let's go do it.

First up, I want to turn my guides back on, that's 'Command ;', or 'Control ;' on a PC. Let’s zoom out a little bit, and I'm going to go 'Command 1', or 'Control 1' on a PC to go to full screen, because I want to get a sense of how big I want these to be, and I think these guys are a bit too large for social icons, because that's the size it's going to be displayed at for a website, so I'm going to make mine a little smaller.

The order of them? The way that this works is, let's put-- Facebook, say is my most important one, and let's say Twitter's next in. Just give them kind of a rough order, doesn't have to be beautiful, and then your last one. The first one and the last one are important. So I'm going to get these guys to span one-- What's that, 4 columns. 

So we've got them in some of order after each other, I'm going to select all of them. Then, along the top here, if you can't see this, say you're working on a really tiny screen, you might have to go to 'Window', 'Align', and there's a whole panel that opens up, or you can use the one on top here, it's up to you. So what I'd like to do first of all is probably get them to align horizontally, so I get vertical and horizontal mixed up every single time, you might be the same. So I'm going to click on this, just so that they're all lined up. Can you see that, all lined up nicely. And then, there's this one called 'Distribute Horizontally'. I know this because I’m reading it from the toolbar there, but let's horizontally distribute, and let's click on it, and it just spreads them up evenly. Cool. So that's how to line them up, and distribute them.

One last thing before you go, just so it’s-- It's not relative to what we're doing right here, but it will become useful for you at some stage. At the moment, by default it's 'Aligning to Selection', which is cool, it's doing exactly what we want it to do, but say you want it to align it to the Artboard, think of that and ‘Align it to the page’. I'm going to group these guys, so they're grouped together. Now I want to say, 'Align', but it's going to do it to the Artboard, so it means, when I click 'Align to the Center' horizontally, it's going to align to the center of my Artboard, and you can see that's quite useful as well.

Remember, it’s the last thing you do, so I'm going to turn my ‘Back to Selection’, and I'm going to go to 'Undo' to put them back where they were, and I might 'Ungroup' them again, because I don't need them grouped.

Alright, so that is aligning and distributing in Illustrator.