: Rotate object in Illustrator while keeping its horizontal alignment I want to copy a shape in 45 degree increments around the center of a circle. Is it possible to do this while keeping the

@Cugini998

There are several ways to approach this.


The typical way, most what graphics designers do is to build a guide scaffold to find the positions with smart guides and clone dragging.



Image 1: Using Guides and smart guides to snap to intersections

The downside of this is that its a bit tedious, and is a it hard to repeat if needed. The upside is that this is pretty straightforward for most tasks and requires almost no thinking, and extends to many more problems.
A slightly more conceptually complicated, mathematical approach is to consider composing it out of 2 separate transforms. One with offset center rotation and one rotate each to counter rotate the object with transform each. In the case of squares this is pretty fast.
You can use Blend and replace spine as explained in this answer under Parametric blend in Illustrator. The benefit of this approach is that you can adjust the number objects easily later.
You can script this pretty easily the cooridnates for the pattern entries are just simply:

sin(i*angle)*radius
cos(i*angle)*radius


Again look up the answer in 3 for a script scaffold.

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