Illustrator® CS4 Bible

Chapter 20. Illustrator Workflow

IN THIS CHAPTER

• Workflow basics

• Packaging — from start to finish

• Tips and techniques for real-world production

Throughout this book, you've learned pretty much everything there is to know about Illustrator. So, what's left? Putting it all together, of course! In this chapter, I walk you through a project that uses all sorts of Illustrator functions and explain how and why I used Illustrator's capabilities throughout the process.

Everyone uses Illustrator a little differently, and even as I wrote this, I realized that I could have done a few things differently in order to be more efficient. Each project that you work on in Illustrator results in a different set of tools and processes, and even if you do very similar things again and again, you find your workflows evolving over time.

Project Background

The goal of this project was to create the box for a brand-new edition of a game I published more than a year ago: Ultimate Werewolf. This would be the second box I created at this size with this particular printer, so I already had some experience in terms of the production parameters. Figure 20.1 shows the final box.

However, I made some mistakes the first time around, such as not including enough bleed (printed area that extends beyond the expected cuts) and fold space for the corners. While the bleed issue was an oversight on my part, the fold space was something totally new to me.

Boxes with printed covers are created by gluing a printed sheet onto flat ...