The Canvas

Zooming and navigating the canvas

You can hold the spacebar, click and drag to pan around the canvas, or use the arrow keys if you haven’t selected any layers.

There’s a few ways to zoom in and out:

• Hold the ⌘ key and use your mouse’s scroll wheel. We’ll scroll in by default when you scroll up, but you can change this at any point by checking the Invert scroll direction checkbox in the canvas tab in your Settings.
• Use the pinch gesture on a trackpad or use the Zoom menu in the toolbar.
• Use the Zoom tool by pressing Z and either click to zoom in or hold ⌥ and click to zoom out. With the Zoom tool enabled, you can click and drag a selection to zoom into a specific area.

There are also a few Zoom shortcuts:

Changing the canvas color

To change the canvas color, click on an empty area of the Canvas to deselect all layers and display the Add canvas color option in the Inspector. Use the color picker to choose a color. You can also use the eyedropper tool in the color picker or press ⌃C to select the canvas color.

Showing pixels on the Canvas

By default, you’ll view the canvas in vector mode. It’s resolution independent and you can zoom infinitely to work at any level of detail. The Mac app measures layers in points — where one point is equal to one pixel on the canvas — and when you export, you can scale things to different resolutions.

If you’re working on a design where it’s important to be able to see individual pixels, select View > Canvas > Show Pixels on Zoom or press ⌃P to enable Pixel Zoom and view individual pixels when you zoom in past 100%.

Showing the pixel grid

Select View > Canvas > Show Pixel Grid on Zoom, or press ⌃X, to see any edges of your layers that don’t align with the Pixel Grid once you zoom in past 600%.

Using Rulers

The Mac app hides rulers by default, but you can show them by selecting View > Canvas > Show Rulers or pressing ⌃R. Insert guides by clicking on the ruler. If you select a layer, its dimensions will be highlighted on the rulers.

Creating Guides

You can click anywhere on a ruler to create a guide. Guides will be visible when your rulers are and if you move a layer on your canvas it will snap to the nearest guide.

You can move a guide by clicking and dragging on it inside a ruler. To remove a vertical guide completely, drag it right towards the Layer List or Inspector until your cursor changes and the guide disappears. To remove horizontal guides, drag them to the top or bottom of the current window.

To remove all of your guides together, Control-Click one of the rulers and select Remove All Vertical Guides or Remove All Horizontal Guides, respectively.

Creating Grids

The Mac app supports two types of grid; a regular (square grid) and a layout grid. You can view both at the same time if you need to.

Square grids

To set up a square grid, choose View > Canvas > Show Grid or press ⌃G. To change its settings (the size of the cells, how often thicker lines appear and the color of the lines), choose View > Canvas > Grid Settings or press ⌃⌘G.

Layout grids

To set up a layout grid, choose View > Canvas > Layout Settings… or press ⌃⌘L and use the options that appear to choose the number of columns and rows, their widths, gutter widths and colors.

You can only apply grids to top-level frames, or to the canvas if there aren’t any frames on it. You can edit the layout options for multiple frames at the same time.

When you have a layout grid set up, layers will snap to it and ignore the Mac app’s Smart Guides.

Snapping and Smart Guides

As you move or insert layers and Symbols on the canvas, the Mac app will automatically show you measurements against nearby layers, as well as Smart Guides that help you snap to a nearby layer’s centre or edges.

If you have two or more layers next to each other, and move another near to them, we’ll highlight their distance and automatically snap that layer to distribute them all equally.

When you resize a layer, if there are similar layers nearby we’ll show you if they have a similar width or height. This also works when you’re resizing a layer that’s overlapping another.

Finally, when you insert or move text layers, they’ll snap to the height or width of nearby layers. Adjust the height of a text layer will also snap the bounding box to the last line of text.