Learn how to create a three-panel display in Adobe Illustrator, including setting up bleeds, adding guides, and strategizing the layout of your artwork. This step-by-step guide walks you through the process of setting up your artboard, ensuring clear lines and artwork all the way to the edge, and efficiently arranging your design elements.
Key Insights
- The creation of a three-panel display begins with setting up a new file in Adobe Illustrator, changing the units of measurement from points to inches, and adjusting the orientation from vertical to horizontal.
- Adding a bleed of 0.125 inches is essential for ensuring the artwork extends all the way to the edge of the artboard and beyond, creating clear lines when printed and cut.
- Utilizing guides can assist in efficiently arranging design elements on the artboard. This includes creating a buffer guide, separating guides for each panel, and placement guides for the icons and panels.
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in this video we'll be working on our three panel display. Let's begin by creating a new file, going to file new, and we'll be selecting from our print templates. From here we'll select the letter template, and let's rename our file three panel display.
Next let's change our units of measurement from points to inches, and change the orientation from vertical to horizontal. In this case we're also going to add a bleed, as bleeds can be helpful for printing out items created in illustrator. We'll click up, and make sure that we have 0.125 inches or 1 eighth of an inch.
We'll then click create. Let's begin now by saving our work, going to file, save, and from here we'll maintain the name three panel display, and click save, and okay. Next let's zoom out, and get a view of our artboard.
For this artboard the first thing we'll notice is that we have a red line around it, this is our bleed. In the future when this is printed and cut, it will be cut so that the art extends all the way to the edge of our artboard, and beyond into the bleed. This will help to have clear lines and artwork all the way to the edge.
To check our bleed we can go to file, document setup, and from here we can adjust our bleed. Currently it's at 0.125 inches, and we'll click okay. Next let's add a few guides to our artboard.
Because we're going to be laying this out with multiple symbols, as well as multiple panels, let's rename our layer one for our guides, and hit ENTER, and let's begin placing guides. As always we'll want to add our rulers, so we'll right click and select show rulers, and from here we can start placing guides. The first guide we want to place is simply a buffer guide.
While we have the bleed on the outside, it's always helpful to have a buffer on the inside as well. Therefore let's create 1.8 inch buffers with our guide on top, bottom, and each side. We'll click and hold in shift, release at 1.8 of an inch.
Next let's talk a little bit about how this artboard will work. The goal of this three panel display will be to have an icon of a tool above, and a text below within a panel or a box behind it. For this art piece we'll have three of these on our artboard.
Therefore it'll be helpful to have two guides that show us the separators between the three panels. In order to do this we could drag over a guide and do the math to determine the appropriate place for it to be, both at one third between this guide and this guide, and two thirds. Or a quick trick is to simply add two guides and drag them between the inside and outside guides.
And now we'll use our alignment tools to be able to perfectly align these. We'll drag a selection box over all four guides, making sure that we first right click and select unlock guides. We'll redrag our selection box, and with these guides unlocked we can now click on the horizontal distribute center within our alignment options.
We'll click and immediately we'll see that our horizontal alignment means that there's an equivalent space between these two guides, these two, and these two. Therefore these two guides are now perfectly centered so that we have three equal sections. Next let's strategize the area where our icons will be.
Dragging from the ruler up top, let's leave our icons right at two inches. We'll place a guide here holding shift, and below we have an area for our panels. In addition let's add a little bit more buffer for each of our three panel spaces.
To do this we'll give ourselves an eighth inch buffer on the left hand side, and for the right hand side since this guide isn't specifically on an eighth inch segment, we'll need to do a little bit of math. To do this let's drag a guide and place it right on top of the other guide, and next let's go up to our x value and we're simply going to type in minus 0.125 or one eighth of an inch and hit ENTER. If you don't see inches as your values, we can adjust the units of measurement by going to edit, preferences, and units.
We'll make sure that our general and stroke are set to inches for our type we can remain at points. We'll then click ok, and next we need to add two additional buffers. One from the top, one eighth of an inch below the top of our buffer here, below our icon guide, and one at the bottom an eighth of an inch above.
From here we can see that we have a long area for our panel and an icon area up top. Additionally we can use this technique if we want to change this from three panels to four panels, or we can use these guides to be able to establish how we want to lay out our art. It tends to be good practice to be able to strategize with guides rather than with shapes and layers that can be more complicated to move later on.
Now let's save our work using CTRL S on the keyboard, and in the next video we'll begin drawing our panels. See you there!