Separating content into groups in Illustrator
Once you’ve opened up your graphic, you should organize your content into layers and groups, which are collections of related elements. They allow you to quickly edit, move, or ignore that content all at the same time.
Groups are pretty similar to layers. One big difference is when you click something in a group using the black arrow tool, **it selects everything in the entire group. Click one red dot? Now you have all of them!
Separating content into groups
Before you do split into groups, break your major content pieces into layers. Layers are for axes, data area, and legend. Groups are for collections of markers, or all of the bars, etc. Anything you’d like to change the opacity/color/stroke width of all at once.
- Hide the layers you are not working on.
- Select everything you would like to put in the new group.
- Select
Object
from the top menu, thenGroup
. You can also presscommand+G
. - Find the group in the Layers window and turn it off and on to make sure you didn’t add anything extra.
- Repeat steps 2-4 for each set of content you would like to group.