February 19, 2009 | Category: Illustrator | Tags: logo design tips

We upgraded to CS4 a little while back and absolutely love it. There are hundreds of little improvements over CS3 that make it a joy to be designing logos and graphics using Adobe Illustrator CS4 or Adobe Photoshop CS4.

The new Adobe Dream Weaver CS4 is awsome too with its new “LiveView” feature, the “Code Navigator” and many more exciting and useful features.

However, the new crop marks features in AI CS4 had us stumped for some time. In CS3, after you had aligned your artwork to the art-board, you would normally go to “Object” menu item and select “Crop Marks” and the marks would appear around the art-board. So when you saved the image to a JPG format, the border of the image would be the same as the art-board and your artwork would be inside it.

In AI CS4, the Object > Crop Marks menu item has disappeared and moved under “Effects” menu item. Secondly, if you select the Crop Marks menu item and applied to an artwork and tried to save a JPG, you would see the crop marks in the image being saved.

If you did not apply the crop marks then the artwork saved as the JPG image would sit snugly with the border of the image. This is not desirable since it is normal for images to have a space between the actual artwork and the border of the JPG image.

We struggled for a little while with this issue before we realized that there is an option in the “Save to Web” dialog box that lets you “clip to artboard”. Check that option and you will have the whole art-board saved with space between the border of image and the artwork.