From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Fundamentals

Setting up page margins - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Illustrator CC 2017 One-on-One Fundamentals

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Setting up page margins

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- [Instructor] Over the course of this chapter, we'll be creating this project from scratch, and it features Chapter Five from the original Wonderful Wizard of Oz, written in the year 1900 by L. Frank Baum, and illustrated by W. W. Denslow. When I say from scratch, I mean the text. I've gone ahead and drawn the tin woodman and the scarecrow in advance. We're going to start things off in this movie by creating a three-page document, so three artboards in all. We're also going to add these margin guides around each one of the artboards as well as these two horizontal guides that separate the headline from the body copy. So the first step is to go up to the File menu and choose the New command, but before we do, I want you to notice that we have a clean white boundary around the edge of the artboard, so we won't be needing any bleed. Just so you know. All right, so I'll return to the File menu and choose New, and then I'll switch to the Art & Illustration panel, and I'll make sure that my units are set to Points, which they are, and I'll dial in those same width and height values that we've used in the past. That is to say a width value of 1008 points and a height of 672, and then I'll Tab my way over to the Artboards value, and I'll take it up to three. Now as I say, we don't need any Bleed, so you can leave these values set to zero. A color mode of RGB is just fine, but I want to arrange my artboards into a single line, and so I'll click on the More Settings button in order to bring up the Legacy new dialog box, and I'll click on this icon right here, Arrange By Column, so that all of the artboards are arranged in a line. Then I'll change this Spacing value here to 100 points, and I'll click on the Create Document button in order to create these three artboards. All right now I'm going to zoom into the first one by pressing Control + 0 or Cmd + 0 on the Mac. Now as I've been saying, Illustrator is not technically a page layout program, so unlike say InDesign, Illustrator does not provide a dedicated command that allows you to create page margins. Instead, you need to create your margin as a custom guide, and so let's start by making sure our Smart Guides are turned on by going to the View menu and confirming that Smart Guides has a checkmark in front of it. Then, go ahead and switch to the Rectangle Tool, because after all, a page margin is ultimately a rectangle, and then you need to hunt around for the center of your artboard. Notice at this point here, I can see a vertical Smart Guide line going up to the center, and so now I'll just move my cursor upward until I see the word Center. Now we need to create a rectangle from the center outward, and you do that by pressing the Alt key, or the Option key on the Mac, and clicking, and the reason I'm Alt or Option clicking is to bring up the Rectangle dialog box so that I can enter some numeric values. So I'll start with those same values I entered into the new document dialog box, which is to say a width value of 1008 and 672 for the height. Now I want to move the edges inward, and just through trial and error, I figured out that I wanted to move the edges inward from the right and left-hand sides by 50 points, and so I'll go ahead and subtract twice 50, which is 100, and so I'll just enter negative 100 after the width value like so, and then when I press the Tab key, notice that Illustrator does the math for me, and now I'll press the right arrow key in order to advance to the right side of the height value. I decided I wanted it to come in 40 points from the top and the bottom, and because 40 times two is 80, I'll go ahead and subtract 80 points this time around, and then when I press the Tab key, again Illustrator does the math, and now when I click OK, because I Alt or Option clicked, I'm creating that rectangle from the center outward. Now we don't want this rectangle to have a fill, so I'll just go ahead and click on this first color swatch on the far left side of the control panel, and change it to None. Now we want to convert this rectangle to a custom guide, and the easiest way to do that is to right-click anywhere inside the document window, and choose the Make Guides command. Now we have a custom margin guide. Now we need to add a couple of ruler guides to separate the headline from the body copy, and so I'll bring up the rulers by pressing Control + R or Command + R on the Mac, and now I'll drag a horizontal guide from that top ruler and drop it any old place inside the document, and the reason I'm putting it any old place is I actually want to position it at exactly 100 points, but that's easier done in a separate step. All right I don't need the rulers anymore, so I'll get rid of them by pressing Control + R or Command + R on the Mac, and now I need to unlock the guides by going up to the View menu, choosing Guides, and then choosing Unlock Guides so that I can now edit them. Now you want to switch back to the black arrow tool, which you can get by pressing the V key, and then click on that horizontal guide to select it. Then when you move your cursor away, you'll see that it is selected. Now the easiest way to move it to a specific location is to bring up the Transform Panel which you can get by clicking on the word Transform up here in the control panel. The X value would change the horizontal position of this guide, which won't make any difference, so just Tab your way down to the Y value and now enter a value of 100 points and press the Tab key to move the guideline to exactly 100 points below the very top of the artboard. Now I want to create a second copy of this guideline 34 more points down, and the easiest way to do that is to click after this Y value, and enter plus 34 like so, and then instead of pressing the Enter key, which would just move the guideline, we want to press Alt + Enter, or Option + Return on the Mac in order to create a copy of that guide at the new location. All right now the horizontal guides only need to appear in the first artboard, but the margin guide needs to appear on all three artboards. So what we need to do is cut this margin guide and then paste it onto all of the artboards at the same time, and to make that happen, go ahead and click on the rectangle to select it, and then go up to the Edit menu and choose the Cut command. Or you can just press Control + X, or Command + X on the Mac. Now, just so that we can see the next step in all of its glory, go up to the View menu, and choose Fit All in Window, so that we can see all three artboards at the same time, and now return to the Edit menu and choose Paste on All Artboards. You will now see margin guides around every single one of the pages. All right now at this point we're done with the guides, so we might as well lock them down by going up to the View menu, choosing Guides, and then choosing Lock Guides. Now I'll just click on that first artboard to make sure it's active, and I'll once again zoom in by pressing Control + 0 or Command + 0 on the Mac. Now finally, we need to do a little bit of housekeeping here inside the Layers panel, so click on the fly out menu icon in the top right corner of the panel and choose the Panel Options command, then select Other and change the thumbnail size to 60 pixels, and click OK. Now I'm going to rename this layer by double-clicking on its existing name and renaming it guides, and then our last step is to create a layer for the text. You can do that by dropping down to the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and Alt or Option + Clicking on it to force the display of the Layer Options dialog box, and then call this layer text, and now I'm going to change the color to Violet, and that way all of the handles and other widgets will show up nicely on screen, after which point I will click OK. That friends is what I consider to be the best approach to creating margin guides across a multi-page document here inside Illustrator.

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