Add guides to the canvas or frames

Guides are helpful when you're trying to precisely position layers or objects in your designs.

Enable rulers

Before you can add guides to your file, you must enable rulers on the canvas.

1. Open the Main menu.
2. Hover over View and select Rulers. 

Create a new guide

To create a new guide, click and drag on the horizontal or vertical ruler to pull the guide onto the canvas.

You can also create a new guide from an existing guide by holding Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows), then clicking and dragging from an existing guide.

Figma has both canvas and frame level guides for positioning and aligning objects in your designs. 

The dotted line acts as visual indicator that your guide is intersecting with a frame on the canvas.

View distances (redlines)

With a top-level frame selected, hold Option (macOS) or Control (Windows) as you click and drag out a guide. You will see the distance (in pixels) between the guide and the frame. This distance is also reflected in the ruler. When the guide intersects your frame it will begin measuring distances between the guide and objects in the frame. 

When a frame is selected, the rulers are highlighted in blue, calling attention to the coordinates of the frame on your canvas. When you select objects in the frame, you'll see the same blue highlights for the selected object. 

Guides inside frames are recognized as another object in the frame. This means you can view redline distances between the guide itself and other elements in the frame, as well as the parent frame. 

Remove guides

To remove a guide, you can do any of the following:

• Click and drag the guide back to the rulers
• Select the guide and press delete
• Right-click on the guide and select Remove guide