Illustrator: how to ensure equal distance between 2 objects and outer edge?

Question

Let's say you have an oval shape, like a face. You draw one cartoon eye and want to duplicate it, but you want the eyes to be symmetrical on the oval - that is, the distance between the oval edge and the left eye is equal to the distance between the oval edge and right eye.

Instead of doing this by eye, how can you ensure symmetry? I was initially aligning them to center and moving each eye left/right with an equal number of spaces. But that is clearly tedious and was hoping there is a quicker way.

Answer 1

Do it by eye first, then

• select and group the eyes (Ctrl+G)
• select both this new group and the face object and horizontally align these to center

By grouping the eyes you make these act like a single object, then with the group + face selected you basicly have 2 objects which can be perfectly aligned with Illustrator's align tool.

Type 'illustrator align objects' into Youtube to quickly see how to work with these things.