Making a margin guide

Over the course of this chapter, we will once again create a project from scratch. The only thing that I am giving you is a kind of a poem. It's a limerick actually. A clean limerick, you'll be glad to know. In a form of a text-only file, your job will be to place that file into Illustrator in order to create the three- page document that you see before you now. And the name of this document incidentally is Final formatted limerick.ai, found inside the 08_type folder. And this is actually a pretty darn simple document in terms of its basic instruction.

Each one of these pages features a rectangle and that rectangle includes the page pattern, these little squiggly yellow lines right here, as well as the green border patterns. And I will show you how to create those live fill effects in a subsequent exercise. Everything else that you're seeing is Live editable text, and by that I mean obviously the title and the byline, and the poem itself, that's all made of text. But also each one of these little pineapple ornaments, that's a character of type and the sun and shell ornaments are also characters of type wrapped around rectangles.

And we will see how all of that works throughout this chapter. Now here is the thing to bear in mind. I am using two fonts, two and only two. They are known as Trajan Pro and Adobe Caslon Pro. If you own one of the full versions of the Creative Suite 5 collection, then you very likely have those fonts available to you on your system. Adobe doesn't include these fonts with every single version of the Creative Suite 5, but with most of them it does. So here is the deal. If you've got the fonts, great, if you don't have the fonts then go ahead and use fonts that are available to you on your system.

Alright, so we are going to start things up by establishing a base three-page document and then we're going to add a few guidelines. So I'd like you go up to the File menu and choose the New command or you can press Ctrl+N, Command+N on the Mac and I am going to go ahead and name this document Base guidelines and I will set my Document Profile to Print. And for Number of artboards, I am going to enter 3 and then because I don't want those artboards to wrap down to multiple rows, I am going to arrange by row. So we have a single row of artboards just as we do in the background here.

And I'll set the Spacing value to 72 points, and while that isn't essential that you space your pages 72 points that is one inch apart from each other that is going to help us when we duplicate our guidelines from one page to the next. So 72 points there and I will go ahead and change the width of my pages to 700 points and Height to 900 points. Now that doesn't correspond to any common paper size. I am just coming up with some dimensions that I think work out well for this specific document. Color Mode is CMYK.

All these other settings down here were predetermined by that Print Document Profile. So otherwise, I am just going to go ahead and click OK in order to create that new document. Now, notice something about Illustrator. Even now, it does rather support multi- page documents, most certainly it gives us multiple artboards. The think it doesn't do is give us any page layout support. For example, we don't even have margins. So how in the world do we get started here? Well, I am going to start things off by setting up a Guides layer. So I will press Shift tab in order to bring back my right side panels which are formally hidden.

And notice that I have a single layer inside of this document. I am going to go ahead and double- click on that layer to bring up the Layer Options dialog box. I will change the name of this layer to guides, I will change the Color to Dark Green, which just happens to suit the overall color scheme that I am going for. And then I'll click OK, and we now have a base guides layer. I will now press Ctrl+R or Command+R on the Mac in order to bring up the Ruler Guides and I am going draw a rectangle that will serve as my margin guides. So I'll grab the Rectangle tool, which I can get by pressing the M key and then I will Alt+Click or Option+Click at some random location in this first Artboard.

And the reason that I am pressing the Alt or Option key is I want that point to serve as the center of my rectangle, and now I will go ahead and enter these dimensions and I will change the Width value to 500 points and the Height value to 700 points. And you may recall that each one of the artboards measure 700 points wide and 900 points tall. So that gives us a total of a 200 point difference both in the Width and Height value, and that will be 100 points all the way around. So in other words a 100 points at top, a 100 points at bottom, 700 points of rectangle in between together adds up to 900 points.

Alright, so I will go ahead and click OK in order to create that rectangle. Obviously, it's not centered on the Artboard at all. So go up to your Control panel and make sure that this guy right there is set to Align to Artboard. And then I want you to click on each one of the Center Alignment icon. So Horizontal Align Center first and then Vertical Align Center second and you've now gone ahead and created a perfectly aligned rectangle on that page. That will serve as our base margins as you will see, we will build up the rest of the guidelines in the next exercise.