This little guide might be useful for those who are also trying to make good looking card prototypes…
Step 1: Ask the printing office/manufacturer for their printing requirements.
As far as I know, they will usually ask for 300 DPI(dots per inch), and usually 3cm bleed; or 0.125″ bleed
Also ask them whether they would like horizontal or vertical orientation for your cards.
Step 2: Decide your card size parameters: I went with “Mini American” standard size, which dimensions are 44mm*67mm
Step 3: Open Adobe Illustrator, and create a new file.
Depending on your printing office’s requirements pick millimeters, or inches.
Color mode: CMYK Color
Raster Efects: What your printing office requires: They went with high(300 ppi)
Preview mode: Default
Now about the width and height: this is the part where it is easy to make a mistake. Now is the time to factor in what your printing office requires as bleed. The calculation goes as follows: Take your desired card size dimensions. Mine was 44mm*67mm. Add bleed length to both sizes 4 times. I will explain why in a later step where I can demonstrate the reasons visually.
So with my example 4*3mm is 12mm. So the Illustrator document I am going to work with will be 56mm*79mm.
Step 4: Import all of your cards images into Illustrator by dragging and dropping them from the file manager. Hopefully when you created them in Photoshop/Ai/Gimp/whatever you were paying attention to their side’s length proportions, so when you resize them now in Illustrator they won’t be distorted. For presentation purposes I imported the front and back sides of a card from my prototype game.
Step 5: Resize your images to their desired print size: In my case: 44*67mm. Then rotate them in order to fit the desired orientation. This part is important! If you have a backside which is not symmetrical always rotate the front and back so that they face in opposing directions, so after printing they will look like this: ***show actual card***
Step 6: Align the front image in the middle. You will do the same with the back image later.
Step 7: Create a rectangle that has the same size as your card plus the required bleed size multiplied by 2! So in my case 44+6*67+6= 50mm*73mm. Then pick Selection tool; Right click on the rectangle: then arrange it to the back! Now align it also in the middle. That is going to be your so called “bleedbox”! If your card’s border has a simple, one color design, recolor this rectangle by using the eyedropper tool, sample the color from your card’s border. (I) In my case this cheese card has a special rusty border, so I am using a textured rusty image I created earlier with the above mentioned 50mm*73mm dimensions.
Step 8: Let’s create the so called “crop marks”
Zoom in on the image, then select the Pen tool. Choose one corner of your image then draw a straight line from it as big as your bleed. Align this line like this: it has to intersect with your art’s corner. When you are ready, copy it and rotate the copy by 90 degrees. Align it like this: make sure it intersects with your art’s corner again. Now drag your bleedbox+art a little to the side like this so it’s out of the way. Then select the 2 lines, and group them. Make 3 copies of it, then rotate each so that they fit all of the 4 corners. Like this. Now you have your crop marks for your corners: align them with the align tool into their corresponding corners! Then rearrange your bleedbox and art to the middle where they belong.
Step 9: Now you are done with the editing part. It’s time to save your Illustrator file as a pdf. Go to File/Save as/Select Adobe pdf. Usually the default settings will be fine, but to make sure everything is okay, match your settings to mine.
Step 10: Setting up your pdf file for printing in Adobe Acrobat.
Open your pdf file.
In the tools menu select “Use print production”, then Set page boxes
Select your proper units settings, I’ll go with mm.
Then at Margin Controls: select: Bleedbox, tick Constrain proportions: and set the bleed size your manufacturer requested: 3mm in my case.
then select Trimbox: and set it to 2 times the bleed: 6mm in my example. Here you can check that everything you’ve done so far is correct. It is 44*67 for me so everything is perfect. Click OK.
Now the printing office will see where they have to cut your card(green rectangle), and they will see your bleed box(blue rectangle); and they will also have their crop marks.
Save this file. And now repeat the same process with the back of your card.
Step 11: Now let’s say you want to print multiple instances of this card, and multiple instances for another card of the same type so they will share the same back side. For example 10 cheddar cheese, and 10 swiss cheese cards. I’ll first prepare the swiss cheese cards in Illustrator.
In the folder where we created the files we have to make as many copies of the .pdf files that as many cards we want to print, so in our example: 10 cheddars, 10 swiss. But first lets make a folder for the cheese card back, and cut and paste the back image file there. Once you made 9-9 copies, select them all. Right click: Combine files in Acrobat. Count them so that you have the proper amounts. Combine them. Then save the file. Now enter the back folder, and make 19 copies of the original file. Select all and Combine them and save the new file. You can delete the copies if you want now, I suggest keeping the originals.
Step 12: You are done, now your cards are ready to send to the printing office or Manufacturer! The printing office where I made my prototypes requested that I should put the fronts with their backs in separate folders, so they would know which type of cards require the same kind of back sides.