Theresa Jackson operates Orchard View Color (Escondito, CA) and has more than 20 years experience in prepress, graphic design, color management and photography. Email her at Theresa@orchardviewcolor.com
The Onyx Sign&Banner plug-in, coupled with Adobe® Illustrator®, provides an uncomplicated file setup for large-format signs and banners. It’s intuitive and easy to use, especially for anyone experienced with Illustrator.
The plug-in has three basic features: Bleeds and Marks, Grommets and Design to Scale. You control all three within the same window, and, the interface feels like a native Illustrator menu.
Bleeds & Marks
The Bleeds and Marks feature offers four bleed choices: none, colored, mirrored and duplicate; and, for custom flexibility, you can separately size each bleed edge.
You add the Sign&Banner bleeds by automatically increasing the artboard size, to accommodate the bleed. In action, it will ignore the Illustrator bleed settings.
The selections:
— Bleed Type None increases the artboard size according to the bleed dimensions.
— Bleed Type Color fills the added bleed area with a chosen color. You can pick the bleed color from the Color Wheel or the Document Swatch library.
— Bleed Type Mirrored (non-raster) mirrors the edge art and fills the bleed area. With the default “Rasterize Bleed” box deselected, Mirror Bleed creates nine, mirrored and masked background copies, to fill the bleed area. (This function works extremely fast and effectively, but could produce a very large file if your design includes a full-size, bitmap-image background.)
— Bleed Type Mirrored (raster) is a “Rasterize Bleed” alternative that creates cropped, embedded images for each bleed edge. This choice works the same on bitmap or vector graphics.
— Bleed Type Duplicate creates a one-pixel, embedded image for each edge, and then stretches the image to fill the bleed area. It also works the same for vector and bitmap backgrounds. The resulting bleed is impressive and runs extremely fast.
— Marks selections are located within the plug-in window’s bleed section. You may add Fold, Trim and Corner marks independently. Unlike traditional offset printing marks, which usually appear outside the artwork, these Marks position inside the artwork’s printable zone. The plug-in also produces dashed-line Marks on an Illustrator sub layer.
Grommets
Grommet placement, the Sign&Banner plug-in window’s second section, is fully customizable. You may locate Grommets by approximate spacing or by total count; and, you can assign each edge independently. Another choice allows you to set the trim edge distance, or to place the grommets in the bleed area.
Design-to-Scale
Design-to-Scale controls the previous features, meaning, bleed, marks, grommets and the stroke-point size for marks – all relate to the scale factor. The settings range from 1-1 to 1 – 36. Design-to-scale eliminates the need for simple math and thus, saves time, money and mistakes.
Other
— Keyboard: You can open The Sign&Banner plug-in with a keyboard shortcut.
— Measurements: You may opt for the Illustrator default setting or select inches, cm, mm or points.
— Sub layers: The plug-in produces a Sign&Banner/Illustrator layer with bleed, marks and grommets sub layers
— Document swatch library: The color picker for marks and grommets also accesses to the document swatch library.
Room to Improve
Sign&Banner automatically references the Illustrator document’s artboard size, which works perfectly for a design built on an Illustrator artboard that’s in proportion, and created at a known scale factor to the final, finished size. The plug-in won’t work under any other circumstances. I suggest a future version allow an operator to set the artboard (trim size) along with the scale factor.
The Color Bleed default color is white, which, at first glance, appears to produce the same result as selecting the None bleed option. I’d rather see the default color set as gray. I’d also like to see the color picker allow you to select a color directly from the art.
The grommets have five, individual, ungrouped shapes. In the rare situation where you might want to move or change the color of a grommet, it would be nice to have a grouped shape.
Conclusion
The Sign&Banner plug-in accomplishes three common prep tasks quickly and accurately. If you currently prep files in Illustrator, you’ll find the plug-in intuitive and easy to use. If you daily prepare multiple Illustrator files, it will save you time and eliminate prep mistakes. Finally, in use, I recommend recording Illustrator actions for all of your sign and banner setups.