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Welcome to our sixth lesson "Using documents templates" brought to you by Printwand. Our
previous section covered "Properly sizing our artwork for use in our documents" and
this lesson is going to discuss our document templates that we use to put together our
files.
So here we have a sample template of a folder that we're working on in Photoshop. Let's
go ahead and go up to our "Menu Bar," we'll go over to "Image" and then "Canvas size."
And we can see here that our document size is a little larger than 20.5" x 16.5". We'll
go ahead and click "OK."
Now let's first notice these tabs on the left and right sides of our template. These are
what our pockets attach to. And so they're both going to fold in, and then the pocket
at the bottom of the document folds up, and it's glued to those tabs - creating a pocket.
But right now we don't really need to worry about them at this point, but just so that
we can note and see what they're doing there.
Let's move over here and we'll take a look at our "Layers" pallet. So we can see that
we have our document template as well as our document artwork both on separate layers.
And we want to separate those layers for the sake of clarity in our document. Let's go
ahead and we'll make our art layers visible so that we can see how our layout works in
relation to our template. We do this by clicking into this grey box to the left of the layer
name.
So notice here how a portion of our artwork is extending past our template lines. This
is our bleed area. This is an area that extends out at least .125" past our document size.
So let's go up and go to our "Menu Bar," we're going to go down to "View," then we're going
to go to "Show" and we'll slide down to "Guides." And now we can see this outermost guideline
here, this represents our document bleed area. We can see that our artwork correctly extends
into this area. So now with our guides on we can also see these lines, kind of on the
inside of our template. These represent our artwork live area. They're located .25" inside
of our document area and this is the area that we want our art and copy to stay in so
that it doesn't get cut off at the margins.
Ok, so let's go back over to our "Layers" pallet, and we're going to toggle on our "Live
area" layer. Now we don't have to have a "Live area" layer on our final document but I'm
kind of showing this to you for the purpose of clarity so that you can see how things
lay out and why they lay out the way they do. We can see that everything is lined up
and laid out correctly on our document, everything falls within our document template and lines
up with our guides. But, if we notice here these groups of markings on the bottom of
our template on the pocket.
Now, these are indicators for different groupings of business card slits. There's a number of
different orientations that can used; what you want to keep in mind is after you've selected
the area that you want to use for your business cards, it's important not to place text in
that specific area. Otherwise, it's going to get covered up by the card and you're not
going to see anything that's behind it.
So there we have some tips to keep in mind when using documents templates and we want
to make sure that your file is set up correctly when we're preparing them to go to print.
Our final lesson will be talking about the "Differences between vector and raster artwork."
So if you've ever had a printer or anyone handling your document ask you for those different
types of files, this is gong to be a really helpful lesson for you.
Make sure to check back often to Printwand for more video lessons as well as other articles
to help you with your marketing and promotional needs.