When you're finished designing your carton you've been
looking at it in two dimensions on your
computer monitor and trying to sort of visualize
it in three dimensions to make sure everything's okay.
It's a good idea to print it out, fold it
up and take a look at it in three dimensions.
Hold it in your hand and make sure everything seems right.
Generally speaking you're working on a carton that's too big to print
out on one piece of paper unless you have a huge format printer.
So I'm going to show
you how you can tile out a large piece on smaller paper.
When I go to File > Print, Illustrator assumes I
want to use the letter size paper that my printer takes.
So, first, I'm going to turn off Auto-Rotate
and that lets me control how it falls.
And then, here's the second part, where it says scaling, do not scale.
Click that little pull down and you have two
choices that make sense, tile full pages, tile imageable area.
The only difference is that imageable area is just where there's
occupied space, and full pages would be up to the artboard.
In my case, tile full pages works just fine because I have everything so
close to the edge of the artboard that it's pretty much the same thing.
There's no overlap at the moment and that means that if I
print it out I would tape it together just edge to edge.
That's going to get really flimsy, even if I use really heavy stock.
A good idea
to give yourself some overlap.
I recommend at least a half an inch, maybe an
inch if you have a larger piece that you're printing out.
You'll have to do a test and see what works for you.
But half an inch I think is going to work for the size document I have.
Now the Placement control, governs how it falls on
the number of pages it thinks it needs to occupy.
So if I click the upper left, I could
almost get away with not using that bottom row.
It would
be the last little bit of my little flap
here and I might be able to live without that.
Depends on, again, the size of your carton
an the features that you want to maintain and test.
So once you've established this, then you print it out with your
overlap, position everything, tape everything together,
and then carefully cut it out.
It's tedious, but trust me, it's worth doing.
Because this is going to let you test for one thing how
it looks in three dimensions. Do you have a panel that's upside down?
Do you have something that's too close to the edge?
And just the general configuration of the carton and
also its going to let you test, if you, especially if
you created your own dieline, test to make sure
those little tabs tuck in the way they ought to.
Make sure they are little flap edges fold where they ought to.
Make sure there's nothing where glue ought to
be applied, where glue flap needs to be occupied.
And finally just get
really a more realistic view of this piece that you've been working on so long.
Not to mention the fact that it's really kind of satisfying
to see it go from two dimensions, finally, into three dimensions.
And it starts to seem a little bit more real.