- [Voiceover] In this movie, I'll show you how
to add dynamic crop marks to your artwork
as well as how to duplicate it so that we have
a total of three nameplates.
Here, I'll go ahead and switch over
to my document in progress.
Now I'll zoom out by pressing Control + 0
or Command + 0 on a Mac.
And then I'll grab my rectangle tool
which you can get, once again,
by pressing the M key.
And I want to draw my crop marks
inward a little bit so that I have some extra room
to crop away.
And so I'll go ahead and click at the intersection
of these two guides right here
to bring up the rectangle dialog box.
And I'll dial in a width of 8 in. like so
and then press the Tab key.
And that'll update the value
to 506 pts.
And I'll dial in a height value of 2 in.
and then once again press the Tab key
to get a height of 144 pts.
And I'll click OK in order to create this shape
right here.
Alright, I don't want any fill or stroke.
And so I'll go ahead and click on this first swatch
up here in the Control Panel
and change it to none.
Then I'll click on the second swatch
and change it to none as well.
Now, to draw crop marks around this rectangle,
you go up to the Effect menu
and you choose Crop Marks.
That's all there is to it.
And that'll draw hairline crop marks, by the way.
They're going to be 0.3 pts in width
and that's just the way it is.
There's no way to control the line weight
associated with dynamic crop marks.
Alright, now just so we can better see
what we're doing, go ahead and turn off
the guides layer and you'll see
that we have a pair of crop marks
on each of the four corners.
Now what we want to do is duplicate
the nameplate by targeting the entire layer
which you do by clicking
in the circular meatball
to the right of the word nameplate right here
inside the layers panel.
And then you want to go up to the Effect menu,
choose Distort and Transform,
and choose the Transform command.
And we're looking for a vertical value,
a vertical move value of 2.75 in. for inches,
once again.
And then when you press the Tab key,
that will update to 198 pts,
at which point, go ahead and turn on
the Preview checkbox and then click
in the Copies value and press the up arrow key
a couple of times in order to create those copies.
And then click OK.
And that way, if you ever decide to change
this top nameplate, the other ones
will change as well.
But here's the problem.
I'm going to go ahead and switch back
to the black arrow tool
and click off my artwork.
Notice that these top crop marks
do not interfere with the image.
They do not cover it up in any way,
shape, or form.
But the next one down does.
Notice that the crop mark that's associated
with the top nameplate is covering up
this bottom photograph.
That's not what we want.
And so to tidy things up,
go ahead and zoom back out
and click on this invisible rectangle
right here, the one that's associated
with the crop marks.
And let's create a new layer
below the active one by pressing
that keyboard shortcut, Control + Alt + L for layer,
Command + Option + L on a Mac,
to bring up the layers options dialog box
and put the new layer below the nameplate layer.
Let's go ahead and call this guy "crop marks"
and then I'm going to change the color to gold,
for what it's worth,
and click OK.
And now, notice this little red square
that represents the selection.
Go ahead and drag it and drop it
onto the crop marks layer.
And that way, we're not covering up
the images anymore but we're not repeating
the crop marks either.
And so what you need to do is target
that new layer and then go up here
to the Effect menu and choose the very first command,
Apply Transform, which is going to reapply
that last dynamic transformation.
Alright, we still have a little bit of a problem.
Notice that the crop marks are pretty far apart
in the top right corner, but down here
in the bottom right corner we've got
this crop mark coming all the way
to the edge of the rectangle.
That's not what we want.
So I'm going to press Control + 0
or Command + 0 on the Mac,
once again to zoom out.
I'll click on the nameplate layer
to make it active.
I'll go ahead and grab the rectangle tool
once again.
And with my smart guides on,
I'll try to find the intersection
of the bottom of the photograph
and righthand side of that yellow rectangle.
And I'll drag up until I snap into alignment
right there.
And I want this shape to have a white fill,
so I'll go ahead and click on the very first swatch
on the far left side of the Control Panel
and change it to white.
We definitely do not want any strokes,
so leave that alone.
And then right-click somewhere
inside the document window,
choose a range, and choose Send to Back.
And that'll go ahead and send the rectangle
to the back of this specific layer
so we can once again see my title
which is Author.
Alright, now I'll press the V key
to switch back to my black arrow tool
and I'll click off the artwork
to deselect it.
And by the way, because this top layer
has that transform effect assigned to it,
that white rectangle that we just drew
got duplicated automatically
onto the lower nameplates.
And that's how you create dynamic crop marks
as well as how you dynamically duplicate
your artwork to create, in this case,
three nameplates.
But it could just as easily be, say,
six business cards here inside Illustrator.