472 Creating place cards for your holiday dinner

- Hey, gang, this is Deke McClelland. Welcome to Deke's Techniques. Now, here in the States, we have this holiday at the end of November called Thanksgiving, and it's pretty freeform, you might watch a parade, take in a few football games, but you always get together with family and friends and you eat, and you gorge, and you eat 'till you're physically ill. If at any time you show the slightest sign of discretion, if you say, "You know, I'm a little full, I think "I'll pass on that third helping of mashed potatoes," then everyone knows you're not a true American, and we boot you out of the country. Anyway, it's always somebody's job to host the Thanksgiving dinner, which is why this week I'm going to show you how to create these custom place cards in Adobe Illustrator.

And, as you can see, two fit up per page, and we've also got these hairline trim marks right there to help you cut the cards out, and you also want to cut along the vertical center and fold along the horizontal center in order to create these guys right here. As you can see, we have a photograph on one side, but just in case somebody doesn't recognize themselves, then we have their name on the other side, so everyone sits exactly where they're supposed to. Here, let me show you exactly how it works. All right, here we are inside Adobe Illustrator looking at the final place cards, just so you can see them on screen.

We're going to create this file by scratch by going up to the File menu and choosing the New command. Next, you want to se the Profile to Basic RGB. The reason we're doing that is, presumably, we're going to be printing this document to an ink jet printer, a local ink jet, something that's in our building, in which case, RGB is the best way to go. Next, you want to set the size to Letter, and this goes for those of you who are working outside the States as well, even if you would normally choose A4, Letters' where we want to start.

As you can see, I'm working in points. Now, I want to give myself a big margin around the artwork, so I'm going to click after the Width value here, and I'm going to enter -2", that is double quote, and then I'll press the tab key in order to advance to the Height value, and as you can see, Illustrator does the math automatically, and goes ahead and returns a value of 648 points. Now I'll press the right arrow key to position my blinking insertion marker after the Height value, and I'll enter -1.5", once again to indicate inches, and I'll press the tab key in order to update that value.

All right, now I'm going to tab down to the Bleed value. You want to make sure that the Link icon is turned on right here, in which case, just change that Link value to 12 points, which is the same as one pica. At which point, I'll go ahead and click okay in order to create that new document. I'm going to do a little maintenance here in the Layers panel by clicking on the fly out menu icon right there and choosing the Panel Options command from the bottom of the menu, and then, I'm going to change my thumbnail size by selecting Other and changing this value to 70 pixels, at which point I'll press the enter key, or the return key on the Mac, to accept that change.

Now, I'm going to rename this layer "photos," and then, I'm going to create a new layer on top of it by alt or option clicking on the little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel, and I'll go ahead and name this guy borders and click okay. All right, now let's create the borders by first going up to the View menu and making sure Smart Guides are turned on. If you see a check mark, you're fine, if you don't see a check mark, go ahead and choose the command. Next, we want to select the Rectangular Grid Tool, by clicking and holding on the Line Segment Tool here, and selecting the Rectangular Grid Tool from the fly out menu.

Go ahead and position your cursor at one of the corners of the art board, and drag to the other corner like so. We really just want two rows and two columns, so press the down arrow key, so you just have a single horizontal line through the middle and then press the left arrow key a bunch of times in order to reduce the number of columns to two so that you have just a single vertical line down the middle and then release in order to create that grid. Now I'm going to go up here to the control panel, click on this down pointing arrowhead, and change the line weight value to 10 points, like so.

As you may know, by default your stroke is going to be centered so it's going to extend 10 points inward and 10 points outward, which is why we need that bleed: to prevent the stroke from getting clipped by the art board. All right, now let's create the text that's going to go on the back of the place cards by, once again, creating a new layer. You can do that by alt or option clicking on that little page icon at the bottom of the Layers panel. I'm going to call this layer names and click OK. Now go ahead and get the Type Tool. Just go ahead and click anywhere inside this top left corner and enter the longest name of any of your guests, which, in my case, happens to be this guy named Constantine.

Now, I'll go ahead and center that text by pressing control, shift, c, or command, shift, c on the Mac, and then I'll press the escape key in order to create that text element. Now, I'm going to zoom in a little bit so I can see things up close and personal here, and I'm going to change my text to all caps by bringing up the character panel, which you can do by pressing control, t, or command, t on the Mac, t for type, of course, and I'm going to leave the font set to Myriad Pro Regular, as by default, but I am going to click on the all caps icon right there in order to switch to all caps, and then I'll change my type size value to as big as I can reasonably go and still have the text fit, which in my case is 48 points, like so.

All right now, this portion of the place card is going to be facing the other direction, so we need to rotate the text by switching to the Rotate Tool, and then press the enter key to bring up the rotate dialogue box, and change the angle value to 180 degrees, and click OK. That will flip the text upside down. Now we need to center the text inside this upper left quadrant. The easiest way to do that is to grab the Rectangle Tool, and then you want to drag from the top left corner of the art board down to the center point, right there, which is the point at which those two grid lines intersect.

That's going to cover everything up, and if you experience that same thing, then click on the very first color swatch up here in the control panel, and change it to none, like so. Now, I'll press the escape key in order to hide that panel and I'll press the v key to switch back to my black arrow tool, and I'll shift click on the base line for Constantine to select it, and now we want to center the text inside the rectangle, and so to turn the rectangle into a key object, just go ahead and click on it once again, and you'll notice it gets a heavier border.

Go up to the control panel, and click on Horizontal Align Center and then click on Vertical Align Center in order to produce this effect right here. All right, now we want to go ahead and duplicate this text by first clicking on the rectangle in order to turn it off, and then just go ahead and drag it by one of its edges until it snaps into alignment, like so. Before you release, go ahead and press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and then release in order to make a clone, like so. Then, just double click inside your text in order to switch to the Type Tool and position your blinking insertion marker, and then I'll just go ahead and select everything but the first c, and change this guest's name to Chloe.

Then, I'll press the escape key in order to accept that change. All right, now what we need to do is place the pictures of our guests, and I'm going to do that by scrolling down to the bottom right quadrant and then I'll click in the photos layer to make it active, and I'll go up to the File menu and choose the Place command. Then, you want to find your guest who is named Chloe, in my case, that happens to be this file right here, Female guest.jpg, and now I'll just go ahead and click on the Place button in order to bring her into the image, and then I'll click at any old spot in order to place that image inside this document.

Now what I want you to do is grab that invisible rectangle that's located in the upper right quadrant, this guy right here, and then drag it down so it snaps into alignment with the bottom right corner of the art board, which happens right about there. Then, I'll just go ahead and release the rectangle and shift click on the photograph so that both the rectangle and the photo are selected, and then I'll click a second time on the rectangle to make it the key object for purposes of alignment here. Next, I'll go up to the Control Panel and, once again, click Horizontal Align Center, and then click Vertical Align Center in order to properly center Chloe inside this space.

Now, in your case, you may need to scale your image, in which case, go ahead and do so, but, of course, as you can see here, I've gone ahead and scaled my images in advance. All right, now I'm going to click in the rectangle to once again deselect it, and then I'll drag it over to this location here, and press the alt key, or the option key on the Mac, and release in order to create a copy of those elements. Now, I'll just go ahead and click in the Paste board in order to deselect my artwork, and I'll click once again on the photograph in order to select it, and I'll go to the File menu and choose the Place command.

I'll locate, in my case, this Male guest file right there, and I'll turn on the replace checkbox so that I'm replacing the selected image with this new guy and then I'll click on the place button in order to place that guy exactly where he goes. Now I'll press control zero, or command zero to zoom out, and I'll go ahead and scroll down a little bit as well, so that we can take in the final artwork. Now what you want to do is go up to the File menu, and, presumably, save your artwork, of course. Once you get done doing that, then drop down to the Print command, and you should see that your artwork fits inside the image-able area of the page, and it should auto-rotate as well, so that it's going to print landscape.

In other words, everything fits. But, you do want to make one change, you want to click on Marks and Bleed in this upper left corner, and you want to turn on Trim Marks, that's going to be really super useful. Notice right there, we can actually see the trim marks inside of the preview. If for some reason you want to move them outward a little bit, then you can change this offset value to something like 12 points and that will actually scoot those trim marks out. The idea is now, after you get done printing your artwork, then you can use those trim marks to exactly trim your artwork, whether you're using a cutting board, or an x-acto knife, or what have you.

You can also cut down the center of this line right there and fold along what will ultimately be a vertical line, and that way all of the strokes are going to be exactly the same width. Of course, you also need to make sure your printer is set to the correct device, which it's not in my case, so I'll go ahead and switch it to our office LaserJet. Then, I'll click the Print button in order to print that artwork like so. That's how you create a couple of photographic place cards for your Thanksgiving or other holiday dinner, here inside Illustrator.

All right, so if you're a member of lynda.com, and if you're not lynda.com/deke gets you a free week, then I have a couple of follow-up movies in which I show you how to draw cartoons of your people using Illustrator CC's Pencil Tool, which is amazing, by the way, and then we'll fill them in to create these really awesome custom cards. If you're waiting for next week, I'm going to show you a more family oriented solution where you create kind of these generic cartoons and then you let the kids color them in according to the hair, skin and outfit colors, the actual outfits that the people are wearing that day, which are going to vary from one person to the next.

Deke's Techniques, each and every week. Keep watching.