How to get perfect crop-marks in Illustrator
September 8th, 2008
Do you ever worry that your crop-marks are a 1/8″ of an inch off? Perhaps, you’re worried that they are not perfectly aligned to the project you are laying out? There is nothing worse then getting a 1000 business cards printed and having the cut be slightly off, destroying your layout. Here is a simple technique on how you can get perfect crop-marks everytime, in Adobe Illustrator.
STEP 01
Open a new document in Illustrator and set the dimensions to be your final output size. For this example, let’s say we are doing a business card and set it to 3.5″ wide x 2″ high.
STEP 02
Design your business card. Don’t forget your bleeds! Have any bleeding artwork go outside the document boundaries. Don’t worry we will come back to the bleeds in a minute. If you’re art doesn’t bleed you are good to go.
STEP 03
From the Object Menu select Crop Area » Make. Illustrator will create crop-marks that line up exactly to your document’s dimensions. The problem is, these crop marks are outside of the document area so they will not print. If you increase the size of the document, then the crops grow with the document. See the next step for the solution to this problem.
STEP 04
From the Object Menu again, select Crop Area » Release. This is the crucial step – note, that once you release the crops, Illustrator leaves a blank box to the exact dimensions of your document.
With the blank box still selected, from the Filter Menu, select Create » Crop Marks. This will create vector crop-marks that you want to include in your artwork when you send it to print.
The final step is to go back to the File Menu and select Document Setup. When the overlay appears, increase your document size to include the crops. For this business card example, increase it to 6″ wide x 4″ high. Hit OK and you are done. Your final layout should look like the image below. You now have perfectly sized and positioned crop-marks!
Print This Post
admin
Does anyone else have any advice on techniques for creating perfect crops?
September 8, 2008 » 7:27 pm