Hi, this is Anne with Graphic Design How To, and today I'm going to show you how to use guides to
make margins and columns in Adobe Illustrator. Before going into the Margins and Columns part,
I'm going to talk a little bit about guides and how they're used. So if you already know about
guides, you can go ahead and skip to the margins and columns section. And I'll leave a comment
below that will point you exactly where you need to go in the video. All right, let's get started.
All right, so here we are in Illustrator. I'm going to come over here to Create New, and then
I'll just hit Print up here at the top, and then Letter right here. And then we'll Create. To make
guides in the normal way, all we have to do is get our rulers up first. And to do that, I'll hit CMD
R or CTRL R for ruler on the keyboard. We can click up here in the ruler and pull down a guide,
and click over here and this ruler and pull a guide down here. Now if you're not seeing these
guides when you do this, you can go to View > Guides and Show Guides. Since mine are already
showing, mine says Hide here. You can also unlock your guides here or lock them. Now I like to keep
mine locked, because I don't want to move them around when I'm trying to work with other objects.
Now one pretty cool thing about guides is that you can make a guide from any expanded object.
So let's do that with a rectangle. I'm going to come over here to the Rectangle tool,
and I'll just draw a rectangle. You can leave it as any fill or strroke,
but I usually get rid of them. So I'll come over here, I'll remove the fill, and then I'll click on
my stroke and bring it to the front and remove that too. And then to change this to a guide,
all we have to do is hit CMD 5 or CTRL 5 on our keyboard, or come up here to View > Guides
and Make Guides right here. And now our rectangle is a guide. We can also do this with text,
and really the only reason you might want to make text into a guide is to leave instructions for
someone who might use this file in the future. So to do that, you can get on your Text tool right
over here by hitting T on your keyboard. I'm going to click once and I'll just type 'text.'
I'll get back on my Selection tool, click on a corner and hold Shift and make this a lot bigger.
Now we can't do this with live text, but if we outline our text, then we can. So I'm going to
go to Type > Create Outlines. There's also Shift CMD O or Shift CTRL O on a PC. So now we have
outlined text. Now we can hit CMD 5 or CTRL 5, and it has become a guide also. All right,
so that is guides in a nutshell. I'm going to go ahead and close this document and start a new one
for margins and columns. So I'll just hit CMD W or CTRL W, which is close, then then I'll hit D
for Don't Save. Okay, so the margins we're going to create are actually made up of guides. So I'll
Create New, I'll come up here to Print, and then I'll choose Letter. I'll come over here, I'm going
to use inches for this, and so it's 8.5x11. And I do want this to be horizontal, because I want
this to be a trifold brochure. We can also set up bleeds here, that's something that's built
in. Margins are not in Illustrator. So I'm going to change this to .125, which is the standard
bleed size. CMYK color is fine and raster effects 'high' is fine. We'll just go ahead and Create.
You can see this little red area outside of the document. That is your bleed. So basically, if
you have big images, they need to at least go out to the red line. First, we'll make margins. I'm
going to hit M on my keyboard, and I'm just going to draw a box exactly the size of the artboard.
And we can check this up here under transform - 11 x 8.5. That is perfect. Now we'll get back on our
Selection tool, and with this still selected, we're going to go to Object > Path and Offset
Path. And this is set at a -.5, which is right here. You can see that it's coming in this far,
but I think we want .25, so a quarter inch. To make it offset inside the rectangle,
you'll have to use a negative number in front. Okay, we'll say OK. So now we have two rectangles,
we have the original one we drew, and we have the offset rectangle. So we only want to select the
offset rectangle, and then we'll hit CMD 5, or CTRL 5 to make it into a guide. And now we have
margins! We have a quarter inch margin on this. I'll click on the rectangle that's left over,
the original one we drew, and now I'm going to come up here to Object > Path > Split into Grid.
And now we get this dialog box. And it's asking us how many rows do we want. We only want the one
row, so that's fine, but we want three columns, so I'm going to increase this to three. And here it
gives us the option of having a gutter. So I want the gutters to be the same size as the margin,
so I'm going to do p.25. It'll automatically calculate how wide they need to be. And I'm going
to click Preview so we can see how it's going to look...and it's looking pretty nice. We'll say
OK. Now all this really is is three rectangles that you've drawn - they're not guides yet. So
we need to change them into guides with CMD 5 or CTRL 5. And of course, you can always go up here
to View > Guides > Make Guides right here. Okay, so our document is set up. But what if we want
to use this document over and over again, and we don't want it to be overwritten by someone?Maybe
this is out on a server or something, and a lot of people have access to it. Let's take
this one step further and add some instructions. I'm going to get on my Type tool and click once
and type 'no text here.' We'll change our font to something a little nicer, maybe Montserrat.
That looks pretty good. I want the text to go in the gutters and in the margins, so I'm
going to make some copies of this and rotate them. I'll hit R on my keyboard to get to the
Rotate tool over here. I've got an anchor point right there. So I can just click and drag this
and hold Shift. Then we'll just get back on our Selection tool and move it over into the gutter
area. Now I'm going to hold OPTION and start dragging and hold Shift so I can add one here.
And I'll just arrow that over a little bit, by the way OPTION is ALT on a PC. Now I probably
should have done this at the beginning, but I'll also duplicate this one and put it up in
the margins. So I'll hold OPTION or ALT, I'll click and drag, and then I'll hit R to get my
Rotate tool and rotate this back down this way, holding Shift to make it snap to 90 degrees. Okay,
so we have our text instructions. Now I'm going to make these into guides. So we'll come up here to
type Create Outlines. And now we can hit CMD 5 or CTRL 5 to make guides like this. The only reason I
ever turn text into guides is if someone else will be using the file often...and if that's the case,
you'll want to go ahead and make a template file. So to do that, go to File > Save As.
And I'm going to save this as 'Trifold brochure.' You'll notice that it has a '.AI'
at the end. So the type of file for a template is an AIT, basically an AI template. So we'll go
ahead and save this out here. Okay, and then we'll close this. Now if I navigate out to my folder,
you'll see that the icon looks a little bit different. This is Trifold Brochure.ait,
and I'm going to open this and look at this. Now we have an untitled document, so it's not a very
easy thing to overwrite a template file, which is what we want. We can create our document, we can
save this as Trifold Brochure and come down here to save, and it won't overwrite that template.
So we have to have the same name but one is an AIT file. So if you find yourself making multiple
documents like this, like trifold brochures, go ahead and set up an AIT file. That way you only
have to set up those margins and columns once. Alright, if you liked this video, please click
the Like button. And I'll see you in a couple days with another graphic design tutorial. Thank you!!!