Page 86 - Photoshop User March 2017

DAVECLAYTON
>Designing in Photoshop
CREATING AN EVENT-SPECIFIC CONTACT CARD
This issue, we’re going to look ahead to Photoshop World (PSW) and something I’ve done for previous visits to PSW. Many of us have business cards, and we tend to collect them as we venture around events, tradeshows, and businesses. But, when you get home and add them to your master collec- tion, you might not remember where you met a particular person. So, back in 2010, for my first ever PSW, I made some cards specifically for the event; I wanted people to remember where they met me. So, we’re going to take the previous two lessons from this column—using our bleed and crop setup, plus guide layouts—to create a fun “We Met at Photoshop World” contact card. Then, we’ll export to PDF to send it to our print service.
For this tutorial, we’re going to make a regular-sized busi- ness card, but you can make yours any size you wish—just think about where people will put them when you hand them over, so don’t make them too large.
LET’S SET UP OUR ARTWORK!
The first step is to create our document, but it’s going to be a little different than normal. Usually, to make a double- sided card, you would either create two documents and save them as “Front” and “Rear,” or create one file and make two layer groups, turning one off to save, and then the other and save. Today, we’re going to use a new feature in Photoshop CC: Artboards. Artboards aren’t strange to Illus- trator users, and InDesign has Pages, which operate much in the same way. They aren’t scary and are actually very handy!
Step One: Jump straight into File>New and, in the New Doc- ument dialog that you now get with CC 2017, head over to the right side and set up your document. In this case, we’re designing an 85mm wide
by 55mm high (about 3x2") standard business card. Because the size of this project is quite small, we’ll add our bleed now and use guides to mark it out. Since we need a 3mm bleed all the way around, we’ll need to add 6mm to each of the two dimensions—you’ll see why when we set up our
[086] layout guides. So, enter
91x61mm. We’ll also need 300 ppi for print (I always default to that as it’s the industry standard, and I have room on my hard drive!), but before you click Create, turn on that Art- boards checkbox.
Step Two: Now we have a blank document on our screen. But we need two, right? Front and back. A quick way to add the second side is to switch to the Move tool (V), click once on the word “Artboard 1” just above the left side of the document to make the artboard active, and press-and-hold
the Option (PC: Alt) key. When you see the additional arrow on the Move tool cursor, drag the artboard to the right to duplicate it, using the smart guides to keep them aligned. (Make sure you have smart guides switched on under the View menu, under Show—super handy to have.) Drop the new artboard to the right, with a suitable gap in between. Now we have our front and back.
Step Three: Next, we’ll use the New Guide Layout (View>New Guide Layout) feature to add our bleed and guides (refer to the January and February issues for full tutorials). The difference with this document is that we’re applying the guides to both artboards, so we need to select All Artboards from the Target pop-up menu in the New Guide
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