Case Study | Multi-Page Blank products (Greetings card example)

Case Study | Multi-Page Blank products (Greetings card example)

Multi-Page Blank products

This article presumes user knowledge of Blank Products and the Blank Product Creation routine. Prior to using the new features outlined in this article, we recommend that you go through the introductory guide on creating your first Blank Product. You can access the article here: Create Your First | Blank Product >>

Overview

In this Case Study article, we will look at Multi-Page blank products. We can use them when we need to create products with multiple surfaces or pages like greeting cards or story books.

What do I need?

Blank product
Blank aspects with correct proportions

Setting up Multi-Page Blank Product

Let’s take a look at the key steps in setting a Multi-Page Blank product. Technically, it's the same as any other blank product. The only difference is that this one uses more than one aspect and print area.


These first steps are for creating calendars but it's the same for Blank multi-page greeting cards or books.

1. Create aspect for every page

First you need to create aspects. It's the same steps as you learned in creating a blank product tutorial. Except this time, when you create the first one, simply click on Create aspect and repeat for the additional pages.

In this case we are creating a calendar product. So we will start with Cover, which is usually the first page on the calendar where you can place the company logo or summary of artworks you used for every month. Then we continue with pages for January, February, etc.
If you are creating a greeting card, you need just 4 aspects. Usually we name them Front, Inside Left, Inside RIght and Back for individual page previews, but you can present both inside pages together in a single Aspect if desired..




2. Configure print area for every aspect

When you have all aspects you need. You can go ahead to print area creation. Same as creating a print area for a basic blank product, except this time we will create a print area for all our aspects. For best workflow, we will name them the same as we named aspects.
Dont forget to include bleed if necessary.


Tip: If you are creating product that use same dimensions for print areas, you can simply duplicate existing print areas. Don’t forget to set correct Aspect.



Congratulations, you created your Multipage Blank Product. You can Print Test to review the multiple output files that the system will generate.

If you are creating a greetings card or story book and want to merge pages together in the artwork, please continue to read on:

Setting up Print Layouts (Merging Print Files)

Print Layouts allows you to connect / merge your print areas into a single output file. Generally for Calendars, Print layouts are not required, but for Greetings Cards and Story books they may be needed to merge the pages together into a single print file. For example, if you are making greeting cards, you can merge front and back cover and print it as a single page.

1. Create Print Layout

Creating a Print layout is easy. Just go to Print Specification tab and click on Print Layouts next to





2. Basic

  1. Name is the name of merged document for output after you print your product.
  2. Print Size is size of merged document. Greeting card from this product is A3 format (297 x 420), we need to make final print layout 2x wider so we can fit both A3 pages. Customer decided to include 3mm bleed on each side.

3. Items

After you set up your basics simply click on Items > create item. Items are print areas that will appear when you merge the document.

  1. Under Print Area, choose which print areas you want on your document.
  2. Position is calculated in mm from the top left corner (0,0) of our merged document. In this case Inside front is left side and Inside Back is right side so it will start from the exact middle of the document, so x=300mm.
  3. Z Index works the same as layers in Photoshop, if you want to overlap your images.



You can print, test and check your print layouts anytime during your setting process. Name of the outputs are the same as name of Print Layout you created.



If you are still not sure about how to set up Print Layout or you want to know more about them, you can watch these videos that will show you this process step by step.
Print Layouts - The Basics
Print Layouts - Repeated outputs
Print Layouts - Multiple artwork files arranged for production

If you intend to use production batches, this article shows how specific results can be achieved by combining print layouts and job templates.

Print Output Combinations using Print Layouts and Job Template Sides feature