Selection, Alignment & Smart Guides

AI-generated layouts get you a strong starting composition, but design is still, in the end, a lot of small manual adjustments — nudging a headline half a centimeter left, lining up three icons on the same baseline, making sure a set of cards is evenly spaced. Lega's selection and alignment tools exist to make that fine-tuning fast and precise, so you're not eyeballing pixel positions or fighting the canvas to get things to line up.

Selecting layers

Clicking a layer on the canvas selects it, and Lega supports multi-select the way you'd expect from any serious design tool — shift-click to add layers to a selection, drag a marquee to select everything inside a region. Once you have more than one layer selected, alignment and distribution operations act on the whole selection as a group, not layer by layer.

You can also select layers from the layers panel rather than the canvas, which is often faster when you're working with a dense composition where clicking the right layer directly is fiddly. See the Layers Panel Guide for navigating and selecting layers by name and hierarchy instead of by clicking through overlapping shapes.

Selection state stays consistent across the editor — select something on the canvas and the corresponding row highlights in the layers panel, and vice versa. There's one selection model, not two that occasionally disagree.

Smart guides while dragging

As you drag a layer around the canvas, Lega surfaces smart guides in real time: thin alignment lines that appear when the layer you're moving lines up with the edge, center, or spacing of another layer nearby. This is the mechanism that lets you eyeball-align things with confidence instead of guesswork — when the guide appears, you're exactly aligned, not approximately.

Smart guides cover the alignment cases that come up constantly in real layouts:

• Edge alignment — left, right, top, or bottom edges lining up between two layers.
• Center alignment — horizontal or vertical centers matching, including centering relative to the frame itself.
• Equal spacing — when you're positioning a third element relative to two others, guides can indicate that the gaps on either side are now equal, which is what makes rows of evenly spaced elements (icon rows, card grids, bullet lists) fast to build by hand.

Because this happens live during the drag rather than as a separate "align" step you run afterward, it fits naturally into how you actually work — you feel the layer snap into place as you move it, rather than eyeballing a rough position and then opening an alignment menu to correct it.

Group-aware alignment

Alignment guides and snapping respect layer groups as a unit. If you've grouped a set of layers — see Layer Groups for how grouping and group-relative coordinates work — dragging the group aligns and snaps the group as a whole against other layers and frame edges, rather than each child layer independently fighting for its own alignment. This is what makes it practical to build a composite element (say, a logo lockup or an icon-plus-label pairing) once, group it, and then treat it as a single well-behaved object for the rest of your layout work.

Precision beyond dragging

Snapping and smart guides handle the common case of visual, drag-based alignment, but they're a complement to — not a replacement for — the exact numeric controls in the properties panel when you need pixel-precise positioning rather than "looks aligned." Use guides for fast, confident layout by eye; use direct numeric input when a spec calls for an exact value.

Why this matters for AI-generated starting points

AI-generated layouts in Lega already apply solid alignment and spacing as part of generation, but no generated layout is going to be exactly what you want after you start editing it — swap in your own copy, add an element, resize something, and things can drift out of alignment with the rest of the composition. Smart guides are what make that adjustment fast rather than tedious: the goal is that fixing alignment after an edit takes seconds, not minutes of nudging and eyeballing.

For more on how layers and groups fit together as the building blocks these alignment tools operate on, see the Layers Panel Guide and Layer Groups.