Zine Template — Part I

I am working on a zine with a small team. It will be a 8-inch by 4 inch landscape and saddle-stitched publication with a full bleed. The team has select old-school Xerox as the final medium. To get started, that is all I need to know.

What I need to do first is set-up a few templates — one template for a single page and one template for a full spread. Two other things that I know are: the final output will be black and white; and that it will be run two-up on a tabloid sheet.

My weapon of choice will be Adobe Illustrator, so I will first create a new document with my full spread template in mind. Ctrl+N for a new document. I prefer to name my documents right from the start, which is a good habit to get into. Start with a landscape tabloid page and a CMYK color mode (if there was grayscale available, I would use that; and since this is for print, CMYK is my next best option). Next, I am going to chop my page height in half — making it 5.5 inches. Click okay and now I have a page.

I like to create and name my layer before I start building, so off to the layers palette. I am going to start with five layers: Cropmarks, Bleed Area, Live Area, Page Outline and Artwork. I will explain what these are for as I go along.

Page Outline is a layer that helps me to be lazy and think less. Basically, it is exactly what it says. I create a box that is the exact size of the page. I use this to align to the document, which is a feature that has been missing in Illustrator for quite some time. Put no fill and no stroke on this box. Save.

Next will be the Live Area and Bleed Area. Create a 4-inch by 16-inch box on the Live Area layer, which is the size of a full spread. We will be using an eighth-inch bleed for this project, so we will need to create a 4.5-inch by 16.5-inch box on the Bleed Area layer. Select all (Ctrl+A), set the page outline as the key object by clicking on it once, and align the objects to center for both axises. You have just created a perfectly centered layout without using any math or a single ruler — laziness at its finest.

Now for cropmarks. Select the Live Area box, then go to Filter » Create » Crop Marks. Instant cropmarks! Move the cropmarks to the proper layer, and you are done with that. Lock down your Cropmarks and Page Outline layers.

Select your Live and Bleed boxes, remove the fill and change the stroke to a half point. I like to make the two boxes different colors and labels; so they are easy to see and easily understood by others. Next we are going to make these layers non-printable, so it doesn’t matter what colors or text you add. Open the layer options dialog by double-clicking on the layer. You want to check lock and uncheck print for both layers.

Tada! The template is ready.