Orkron Studios

I spend a large percentage of each day creating Newspaper and Magazine Advertisements through the design firm I work for. I’d say a good 70% of each day is focused primarily on that.

If you’re familiar with doing these types of ads, you’ll know that you get some of the weirdest dimensions to work with; forget the difference between picas and pixel, or inches vs. points: I’m talking when the work order slides onto my desk with a 3-column inch by 4.997 inch height…

Okay, so you get the specs and you’re looking at something like: 4.265″ wide x 4.997″ high (or whatever). The thing about Illustrator is that when you create a new document, it only goes two decimal places out and that’s just not okay to lob off your client’s ad-space (even if it is virtually nothing).

I’m writing this article to explain the best practice method I’ve come up with over the years; hopefully it will help you streamline your workflow by removing the struggle you might face if you happen to set up your document wrong in the beginning.

I’m writing this for Illustrator CS3, but CS4 works the same. Other versions of Illustrator have these option but they may be placed a little different.

If you’re ad is smaller than a sheet of paper, simply choose the standard document size to begin with.

We do this because our advertisement has a 3-decimal place dimension, but Illustrator only allows 2 for the document size…

Now at this point, I always set up my center points (using the guides and Rulers); this just makes alignment easier during the actual design process.

Now create a rectangle in the size of your design: to make the rectangle to exact specs, choose the rect. tool and click once in the artboard area. A dialog box will pop up and you can set the dimensions in the width and height fields. Here is where Illustrator will allow you to create a 3-decimal (or even 4) shape.

Make sure the rectangle doesn’t have a stroke, and choose a simple color (it really doesn’t matter) like black. Then center the Rectangle using the premade guides we set up before.

Now you need a duplicate of this shape. My favorite method for this is – select the rectangle, and press Control + F (Command +F for Mac users). This duplicated the object and places it directly above the first.

Now a very important step (explained later) is to set your crop area. I’m explaining this for Illustrator CS3 not for CS4 because it’s slightly different results in CS4.

To set the crop area, select the top Rectangle and choose Object -> Crop Area -> Make.

This sets the crop area and removes the second rectangle (in CS4 the rectangle won’t go away so you will really only need the one).

So now you have crop marks, and a rectangle you don’t want left -  that’s okay, because now we’re going to put that last rectangle to good use!

Select that last rectangle and choose View -> Guides -> Make Guides.

Alright! Now we have Center Guides, Crop marks, and a Rectangle Guide.

Now I like to keep my Guides and my Artwork separate. Create a new layer; name the Guide layer “Guides”, and the Art layer “Art”. I prefer to lock the Guides layer so I don’t accidentally select something in it and move it.

95% of the ads I create need to be published as Press-Quality PDF’s. The reason to set the crop marks in advance to the exact dimensions is so when you save to the PDF format, the artboard will be cropped perfect without the need to post-crop it from within Acrobat.

This system also works great if the output is for JPG (make sure to choose RGB rather than CMYK in those cases).

I hope you find this useful; I’ve found that this method shaves minutes off every design I do!