Adobe Illustrator is a great tool for creating and design posters, but if a few steps are not followed properly, your final poster will be printed differently than your Adobe Illustrator appears. 

Follow this Tutorial to learn how to setup your files correctly for Shortrunposters.com so that your next order yields to results you expect.

Our internal workflow here at Shortrunposters.com is based on Adobe's CS3 version of InDesign.  We have created helper applications and software to let our website "talk" to InDesign in an efficent manner that helps us keep costs down.  We wanted to work with a versital and universal platform for rendering Postscript files that our digital press would read while keeping the software "friendly" with a lot of different image types.  However, Adobe InDesign, like many other DTP programs, interprets EPS and PDF files created in Illustrator in what seems to be an unintuitive way.  But actually its the way that Illustrator creates these files that seems unintuitive.

Unlike other Adobe programs such as Photoshop and InDesign, Adobe Illustrator doesn't take much value you in the actual dimensions of the artboard when your file is exported or saved to another format.  When you create a new file in Illustrator, the "Artboard" is the bounding area you see and build your file around.  When you save this Illustrator file as an EPS or PDF, Illustrator actually crops the image to the artwork, rather than to the Artboard.  This can cause problems when you have created something smaller than the Artboard and want it to print at 100%.  Remember, our workflow will not import and print images at 100% unless it is sized to 17" x 23", rather images are imported into the template area (17" x 23"), rotated if necessary, scaled to fit and centered.  

Let's take a look at what happens when we have content within the Artboard and when we have content outside the Artboard...

Example 1:  Items Within Artboard Area

In this example, we have created a new Adobe Illustrator file with the dimensions of 17" x 23".  Within this file we will create an 8" red square and then save this file as an EPS. We would expect that when this is imported into InDesign into a 17" x 23" file that we would have a red 8" square in the middle.

Now, let's import this into InDesign to see what happens.  Remember, Shortrunposters.com uses a modified version of InDesign for our workflow.  Every image that is imported into a template is proportionately scaled to fit the print area - this is all done automatically.

This is what we get left with.  If you open this EPS file in a program like Preview, all you will get is a big red square with no white area around it.  Illustrator automatically crops to the artwork when saving out or exporting.

Example 2: Items Outside of Artboard Area

In this example, we will take  this same red box, but add doodled grocery list off to the side.  Common sense would tell us that if there are things outside of the artboard, then the shouldn't be included in the EPS file when it's saved  out.

In Illustrator we've simple created a text box outside of the Artboard and put in some text.  Let's see what happens when we import this EPS file into our InDesign template and scale to fit.

As you can see, Illustrator has cropped this image to the artwork, not the Artboard.  Silly.

Now lets take a look at the ways we can trick Illustrator to save a file that actually uses the Artboard as it's full work space.  When you are creating files in Illustrator for Shortrunposters.com, you must use one of the methods below to ensure that your files print correctly.

Method 1: Drawing a Blank Box Around Artboard

Using this method, you cannot have anything outside the artboard for it to work.  Basically, your just drawing an empty box around the artboard itself.  It needs to have no color for either the frame or the body.

You can make this box on a bottom layer and hide it if you want.  This will make it easier to work depending on what you are doing.  When this is imported into an InDesign template the same size as the Artboard, it will maintain at 100% size.  

If you don't want an item to increase or decrease in size, in other words maintain at 100% size, make the file 17" x 23".

Method 2: Using the "Make Crop Area" Command

This is probably the best method in my opinion.  In this example, we'll use the "Crop Area" command to reclaim the Artboard as the area we want to export.  With this method, it's not important if there is anything outside the Artboard.

Be sure that nothing is selected when you initiate this command, or it will crop to that element alone.

 You will see crop marks on the corners of the Artboard.  Once this step is complete, simply export or save as usual.  

If you have any questions about this tutorial or any other, please feel free to contact us.