Please Don’t Call Artboards “Pages”

The artboard concept is best suited for projects such as collateral pieces that share swatches and common bits of artwork, or projects with multiple versions. While it’s tempting (and easy) to refer to artboards as pages, please don’t think of them as pages: Think of them as sheets of drawing paper. Perhaps that will help you resist being lured into building a 16-page brochure as an Illustrator file with 16 artboards (this will cause the prepress guys to refer to you in unflattering terms once you are out of earshot). It’s a case of “just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.” Artboards don’t provide basic page-layout features such as master pages, margin guides, and automatic page numbers. Consider those omissions to be nature’s way of saying “Use InDesign.”

Is there a sound technical reason why you couldn’t build the 16-page job in Illustrator? The grudging answer is that there isn’t, but your print service provider will probably be a little aggravated at you, especially if you forget to send the support images and fonts. If you use the Scoop plug-in from Worker 72a (www.worker72a.com) to gather up fonts and images, at least you will have sent all the pieces. But better yet, learn InDesign!