Discover how to create a postcard file in Adobe Illustrator, an essential step in graphic design projects. Learn the process of setting up the file, including changing dimensions, increasing raster effects, and adding a bleed to ensure colors run all the way to the edge when printed.
Key Insights
- Setting up a postcard file in Adobe Illustrator involves creating a new file, adjusting the units of measurement to inches, and setting the width and height to specific dimensions. In this case, they used six inches for width and four inches for height.
- It's crucial to add a bleed to your design work to ensure that when printed and cut, the colors run all the way to the edge. This can be done by increasing the bleed to 0.125 inches.
- For high-quality output, it’s best to set the color mode to CMYK and increase the raster effects to high at 300 ppi. Additionally, creating guides is necessary to ensure all important art is well within the artboard and the area that's been cut.
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In this video we'll be creating the file for our postcard. So let's begin.
We'll start by creating a new file, going to file, new, and next we'll go over to print to look for a postcard template. If we select view all presets we'll see that we don't have one of the measurements we want, however we can create one. To do this we'll go into preset details and first start by double clicking our title and giving it a new name.
We'll title this postcard. Next let's work on the proportions of our artboard. We'll start by changing the units of measurement from points to inches and for our width we're going to double click and type six.
For our height we'll have it be at four inches. Finally under artboards we're going to increase this by clicking the top arrow to two artboards since we'll have a front and a back of our postcard. Moving down we're going to add a bleed to our postcard.
A bleed allows us to have art outside of our artboard, however it will print so that when we cut across it outside the artboard the colors will run all the way to the edge. For our bleed we want to increase it to one eighth of an inch or to 0.125 inches. Next we'll scroll down and we'll make sure that our color mode is set at CMYK color since this is the color mode that will be used for printing.
We'll increase the raster effects to high at 300 ppi and for our preview mode we'll leave it at default. We'll then click create and we've now created the file for our postcard. Let's start by saving our file going to file, save as, and here we'll see that we have our file name.
It's called postcard and it has the extension Adobe Illustrator or .ai. We'll then go to our unzipped folder and save it in here along with our icons and interface files. We'll click save and we'll click ok. Next let's quickly reset our workspace in case we may have made changes throughout.
We'll go to the top to VDCI and we'll simply select reset VDCI. That way all of our proportions and our panels are in the correct spot. Now let's begin by discussing the strategy for our postcard.
To do this let's open a file explorer window, go into our C drive where our unzipped folder is, and let's preview our postcard preview PDF. We'll double click and here we can see a preview of the postcard that we'll be creating. From the looks of it we have one side that's in full color with some text, a title, details of the event, and a subline, as well as we have a pattern in the background, a shape, as well as a woman who will be a recruiter.
Below this we have the front of our postcard. The front of a postcard will have the lines for the address. So on our front we have our lines for the address, a separating line of dots, as well as a title, some information, and three of the icons that we've previously created with circles around them.
As we begin designing this postcard feel free to open this PDF for reference. Let's now go back into illustrator and start by creating some guides. On the left hand side we'll have our
front artboard with the address lines, the separator line, as well as the title, paragraphs, and icons.
So let's start by creating a couple guides for our artboard. We'll shift our perspective over using the hand tool shortcut H on the keyboard, and just drag over, and let's zoom in using CTRL PLUS (+) on the keyboard so we have a better view of our artboard. From here we can add guides.
To do this we need to make sure that we have our rulers on, which we can either go into our properties panel and add rulers by using the selection tool, and we'll simply select click to show rulers. In addition we can access these by right clicking outside of our artboard and clicking hide or show rulers, or by going to view rulers and hide or show rulers will be displayed here. Additionally if we want to change our units of measurement we can do so by going to edit, going down to preferences, and going over to units.
From here we can change our general units of measurement to inches or to pixels. In this case let's choose pixels and we'll click ok. We'll see now in our rulers that it's been changed.
In addition if we go to edit artboards we can click here and we'll see that our artboard is now displayed in width and height in pixels. To change this back we can go to exit and either go back into edit preferences or with the selection tool and nothing selected we'll go to units in properties panel and select inches. Here if we click edit artboards we'll see that our artboard is now displayed in inches.
We'll click exit. Next let's create our guides. I usually like to start by creating a guide by clicking and dragging from the left and simply adding a center line.
We'll hold shift and snap our guide right to three inches. Next let's add an additional line right through the middle so we can see where our center is easily. To do this I'll click the ruler from the top and drag it down to two inches since two inches will be halfway between the top and bottom.
I'll then release. As we can see around our artboard we have a red line this indicates the bleed. While it's not part of the actual art it will be important to have any art that comes to the edge of our artboard extend all the way to the bleed so that when the postcard is cut it's cut having the art go all the way to the edges.
Next let's create a couple guides close to the edges so that we can make sure that all of our important art isn't too close to the edge. To do this we'll add guides one eighth of an inch on the inside of our artboard. We can click and drag and we'll leave a guide right here.
We'll do the same thing on top leaving a guide an eighth of an inch in the same thing on the right and on the bottom. These guides will help us to make sure that all the important aspects of our postcard are well within the artboard and the area that's been cut. As one final step let's now rename our layer titling it front for the front of our artboard and then guides since all the guides are currently contained within this layer.
We'll then hit ENTER and let's save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard to save and in the next video we'll start designing the front of our postcard. See you there!