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 by 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 one-eighth of an inch.
We'll then click Create*. Let's begin now by saving our work by going to File > Save*, and from here, we'll maintain the name Three-Panel Display*, then click Save and OK*. 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 trimmed so that the art extends all the way to the edge of our artboard and into the bleed. This will help ensure clear lines and artwork that reach 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 OK*. 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 Layer 1 to Guides*, and hit ENTER. 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 one-eighth inch buffers with our guide on the top, bottom, and each side. We'll click and hold Shift, and release at one-eighth 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 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. To do this, we could drag over a guide and do the math to determine the appropriate placement—both at one-third and two-thirds between this guide and that one. Or, a quick trick is to simply add two guides and drag them between the inside and outside guides.
Now, we'll use our alignment tools 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 re-drag our selection box, and with the guides unlocked, we can now click Horizontal Distribute Center within our alignment options.
We'll click, and immediately we'll see that our horizontal alignment results in equivalent spacing between these guides. Therefore, the two new guides are now perfectly centered, giving us 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. Below, we’ll have space for our panels. In addition, let's add a little more buffer space for each of our three panel sections.
To do this, we'll give ourselves a one-eighth inch buffer on the left-hand side. For the right-hand side, since this guide isn't specifically on an eighth-inch segment, we'll need to do a little math. We'll drag a guide and place it directly on top of the existing guide. Next, go up to our X value and simply type “-0.125” (or one-eighth of an inch), and hit ENTER. If you don't see inches as your units, we can adjust them by going to Edit > Preferences > Units*.
We'll make sure that General and Stroke are set to inches. For Type*, we can leave it at points. We'll then click OK*. Next, we need to add two additional buffer guides—one from the top (one-eighth of an inch below our icon guide), and one at the bottom (one-eighth of an inch above the bottom).
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 establish how we want to lay out our artwork. It’s generally good practice to strategize with guides rather than shapes and layers, which can be more complicated to adjust later on.
Now, let's save our work using CTRL+S on the keyboard. In the next video, we'll begin drawing our panels. See you there!