Adobe Illustrator offers plenty of alternatives to good old Copy and Paste, depending on what you're doing at the time. In this quick tutorial we'll look at creating multiple instances of a single bumper sticker on your artboard. With this method you'll need only edit the original to change all copies on your page. We'll also look at how the Graphic Styles palette can help us round off the process.
Final Image Preview
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Step 1: Open a New Document
For the purposes of this demonstration I've decided to print my own bumper stickers; I have some A4 sheets of sticky-backed vinyl and I'm ready to begin with creating the document.
Go to File > New to open up the New Document dialog. As you can see I've created an A4 landscape page, CMYK as I intend to print. Define your parameters and click OK.
Step 2: Your Design
Design your sticker, business card, flyer, or whatever you're choosing to make and place it wherever you want on your artboard; we'll worry about proper positioning in a minute. My bumper sticker measures 120mm by 40mm and I'm sure you'll agree, anyone would be proud to have it displayed on their vehicle...
Step 3: Crop Marks
So we can guarantee correct cutting after we've printed our stickers let's add some crop marks to the design. Select the main background object and go to Filter > Create > Cropmarks.
Step 4: Cropping the Crop Marks(?)
The standard Crop Marks which Illustrator creates in this way are a little on the big side for our needs; we'd like to fit as many stickers as possible on an A4 page after all. Trim them down by first setting your keyboard Increment to 2mm. Do this by going into the Illustrator > Preferences and entering your value as shown below.
Then use your Direct Selection tool to take each outer anchor point 10mm inwards (five taps on the Arrow keys) and each inner anchor point moves 2mm inwards (1 tap on the arrow keys). Much better!
Step 5: Bleedin'...
When cropping print work it's always advisable to add a bleed of around 3mm. Again, select the main background object. Now go to Effect > Path > Offset Path, and enter 3mm in the Offset Path dialog, then click OK. It's not necessary to expand this effect, we'll leave it so that we can edit it should we need to.
Step 6: Group Together and Reposition
Select all the elements of this completed object and group them together. Position the group somewhere top left on your page. Showing your page tiling at this point (View > Show Page Tiling) may be helpful to prevent you from placing anything outside the printable area. The Page tile is visible as a dotted area within the artboard:
Step 7: Duplicate
With your grouped object selected, go to Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform...
In the Transform Effect dialog, choose to make 1 copy and move 140mm horizontally to the right. You'll have to enter this figure using the keyboard; it's unlikely the slider will travel far enough to reach this value. Also, make sure Preview is checked, that way you can be sure to position the copy within your page boundaries.
Step 8: Triplicate
Well, that's sorted out the horizontal copy, now let's distribute some copies down the page too. Select your original object and go once again to Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform...
In doing this you'll be warned that you're about to apply a second instance of the effect. That's exactly the plan, so click Apply New Effect.
Step 9: Enter Values
The Transform Effect dialog will open once again, this time state that you'd like two copies and move each one vertically -60mm. A minus value here will move your objects vertically downwards.
Step 10: Check, Please!
At this point it should be clear to you that what you have on your artboard is just one object, visually reproduced. If you toggle to Outline mode (Command + Y) you can check that there is indeed just one object on your artboard. This also means that any alterations made to the original object will be mirrored in the duplicates. Change a color, see for yourself.
Should you want the duplicates to become independent, select the object and go to Object > Expand Appearance. Each one will become an object in it's own right.
Step 11: Save for a Rainy Day
It's been an enormous amount of hassle to get your document this far, right? Well never fear! Should you need to repeat this process again in the future you can save the effect using the Graphic Styles palette. First, you'll need to open your Appearance palette (Window > Appearance).
Step 12: Drag 'n' Drop
Now, open your Graphic Styles palette (Window > Graphic Styles). With your object selected, you'll see the group's appearance attributes listed in the Appearance palette. Drag the thumbnail next to 'group' into the Graphic Styles palette and a new style will be created with the attributes of your object.
Step 13: It's all in a Name
Give your style a name by double-clicking the thumbnail within the Graphic Styles palette. In the Graphic Style Options dialog which appears, enter a name of your choice (multiple stickers, or something) and click OK.
You'll see in the Appearance palette that your group has also inherited the name of your newly created style.
Whenever you want to use the style, create a group of objects and click on the thumbnail. Easy!
Conclusion
There you go, an A4 page dotted with (dynamic) stickers, ready to print. A few very simple steps, but a handy skill to have and a satisfying end result. Hopefully you'll find all manner of uses for this one..!
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User Comments
( ADD YOURS )Jonathan December 2nd
Very good trick, the only thing that bothers me a little is that printers don’t use mm as a standard. I would keep it in points. but nice trick
( )OpenSourceHunter December 2nd
Nice tut, hope to see more printing stuff here on this site
greetz
( )http://www.opensourcehunter.com
Erik December 2nd
This is ok, but if you are submitting a file to a print shop, usually they prefer to prepare the files themselves. It’s good to call your them first.
Another thing is if you share the crop and bleeds, you would likely get 8 out instead of 6 on a page.
( )Kasper Skov December 2nd
Nice tut, Yes we need more printing tuts.
( )Mr Kuzio December 2nd
This tutorial is awesome.
We can reach the same result with Adobe InDesign and I advise you to do this with InDesign.
The difference is in the weight of the document, even during the work even in the final result when you go to print it.
This lesson is for who don’t have InDesign, it’s not wrong, but it’s more hard then you need, you see?
Naturally if you want to be a skilled professionist you have to use the right tools: Illustrator for drawing and InDesign for print. (Photoshop is for photo manipulations, Acrobat is for export files for external services in .pdf)
Anyway I love this site, is good to read about design from designers.
SCRIVETE IN ITALIANO, VI PREGO!!!
( )Printer Steve December 2nd
Nice try but this is all wrong. As a prepress operator, I “gang” images like this all day and any printer would freak out about your paper waste between the images. You should butt-up the bleed since it gets cut anyway.
Ultimately a designer should let the printer do stuff like this. You have no idea what size paper will be used or if they would gang up other graphics on the same press sheet in order to save you and them money.
( )Dante December 3rd
Great trick—but Veerle Pieters beat you to it by a year and a half:
http://veerle.duoh.com/blog/comments/making_your_business_cards_dynamic_in_illustrator/
( )Colin Capurso December 3rd
I was prepressing screenprinted stickers for years.
You’re almost 100% there, but if those stickers have a solid colour bleed, then they would share cut lines. Cutting is a lot of the work.
On your layout, you’ve got 10 cuts. In the right layout it’d be 6. Trust me, makes a huge difference.
( )Colin Capurso December 3rd
Mr Kuzio: I would have to disagree with you on this one, screenprinting often needs a lot of hand drawn trapping that would be too inefficient to be done in Indesign. Yes Indesign is for press, but screenprinting is the exception.
( )Kev December 3rd
Cool if your using Illustrator CS3. Now in CS4 that’s all gone. I’m still trying to get a better way to do crop marks and adjust them. Everything is locked now. If you ever find a similar way, please post.
Thanks.
( )NGP December 3rd
I agree. Illustrator for illustration, Photoshop for photo manipulation and InDesign as the aggregator / type setting application. InDesign gives you way more control over the bleeds and the other printer settings. And also to echo Erik’s comment, each print shop is different and has different color/bleed requirements, which is why they often provide PDF presets to their clients, and then worry about the imposition. This tutorial also assumes you know the size of the sheet ahead of time, and leaves less flexibility to the printer to maximize paper used to reduce paper waste and reduce costs.
On the other hand, if you are printing say christmas cards at home on your inkjet printer, and you know the paper size etc, this is a great trick to use.
( )Ryan December 3rd
Great tutorial, dont listen to some of the comments listed here about working in pts not mm, Pts is to be used for multimedia a printer will always want there information in mm so that it can be understood universally. Also 3mm bleed is industry standard so the authors guess is founded
( )Ian Yates December 3rd
@Erik
@Printer Steve
@Colin Capurso
@NGP
Thanks for the comments, I guess I underestimated how everyone would feel about this one! I must remember to make clear the differences between ‘can’ and ’should’. The tutorial was more aimed at demonstrating dynamic effects in Illustrator than stating proper print practice.
It seems to be a hot topic, I stirred up these muddy waters with my multi-page PDF tut in September, causing antagonism between readers left, right and center!
Useful critique though, thanks.
( )NGP December 4th
@Ian:
My comments were by no means meant to put your work down at all, and this tip is useful in some circumstances, just not the ideal way to go about creating something for print.
This is very useful because it is likely that someone that specializes mostly in web based work will probably not have access to indesign because its in a different suite by Adobe. If they need to do some print work then this is a great option, for business cards and stuff.
I have always said that Envato should create a “printtuts” or “layouttuts” or “designtuts” for print based applications and workflow, that could cover InDesign, Quark and how they relate to Photoshop and Illustrator
Thanks for the good work!
( )Daniel December 7th
that all
( )David December 9th
Great tutorial…would really appreciate seeing more print information/tuts on here for printing. Cheers!
( )Patareco December 14th
Thanks for the tut! I was already doing something similar! Glad to see other ways of doing it!
( )elthaco December 15th
I think the biggest point that was missed here was. Never ever send an Illustrator file to your print service. PDF it. Most of graphics today work with pdfs instead of the old EPS. You can even ask some graphics to send their PDF profiles so it fit better into their specs.
And yeah, thats a lot of waste of paper ><
( )Super Print December 15th
Multiple instances are not necessary, most printers will accept a high resolution PDF and gang up the images themselves to save paper.
It’s best to setup print jobs in Indesign or Quark as they handle typography much better.
Nice tutorial none the less
( )Portfedh May 15th
Saved my day… Thank You
( )