Tips Trends and Techniques Tuesday - Alpha Alignment in SBC+

Welcome to another edition of TTT Tuesday! Today, I’ll be showing SBC+ users how you can use the Arrange tab to adjust the spacing in an alpha. I really like the look of an evenly spaced alpha on a page and I just don’t have the time or the patience to eyeball it. Have you ever heard the term ‘kern’? According to Wikipedia, ‘kern’ means ‘the process of adjusting the spacing between characters in a proportional font, usually to achieve a visually pleasing result.’ Fortunately there are some handy dandy tools built right in to SBC+ to help us get that ‘visually pleasing result’ without a lot of effort.
First, place the letters on your page that you want to use. I usually then drag them over to the side so I can play with them without worrying about grabbing anything else on my page by accident.

Next, arrange your letters to make your word. Place them about how far apart you’d like them to be, but don’t worry about being perfectly accurate.

Once you have the letters placed, select them all and click on the two Alignment options circled below. The bottom one will arrange the elements so that they are evenly spaced horizontally and the upper one will align them along the bottom edge. This gives my title a nice and neat look.

Sometimes, though, I want to give a word or phrase the look of a little randomness, but again, I don’t want to put too much time into it. For this version, I rearranged the letters so they were a little closer together, and again chose the option to space them evenly horizontally. Now instead of aligning the letters along the bottom edge, I centered them horizontally.

Once I got the spacing how I wanted it, I grouped the letters, resized the group down to fit my space and added my shadow. Here’s my final page using Trixie Scraps recent release, Siblings Are Forever.

Nearly every Trixie Scraps kit includes a coordinating alpha, so I hope this little trick saves you some time the next time you want to create a title or wordart with an alpha! I hope to see some examples of this tip in the Trixie Scraps Gallery!! If you have any tips you’d like to see in the future regarding SBC+, please leave us a comment below.