The Illustrator Process

Figure-drawing process in Illustrator, to be followed precisely!

• Create A4 portrait canvas
• Page Setup, set to A4; margins are now freaky, should work out how to fix
• Turn on smart guides (and snap to point off), and put guides at the left, right and top margins, and the bottom of the page
• draw a box from the top of the page area to the top margin; move it to the bottom of the page and snap it to the guide at the edge of the page; pull out a horizontal guide and align to the top of the box - this is the substitute bottom margin guide; delete the page bottom guide
• for an n-panel figure, make n-1 horizontal guides; select them and the top and bottom margins, and distribute
• make text boxes for panel letters, in 48 pt Helvetica, with a space after; align left to the left margin, and up to the relevant panel boundary guide
• draw out a vertical guide and align right with the panel letters; this is the left edge of the panels; the panel letters will be shifted by this too, so deselect the guide and align them right again
• make text boxes, in 12 pt Helvetica with two spaces after, for all the labels that lie at the left edges of panels, and put them in roughly the right places; align them left to the panel left edge
• draw out a vertical guide and align right to the left-hand labels; they will shift, which is fine; this guide is the left-hand edge of the graphical part of the panels
• now work through each panel in turn, doing layout
• make a three-line 12 pt Helvetica text box, align it down to the lower panel boundary, and align a guide to its top edge; this is the bottom of the panel graphical area - bottom edge captions should go between it and the absolute panel bottom, distributed
• place images in the graphical area, size ad hockly; align the leftmost to the left edge of the graphical area, and the rightmost to the right margin; distribute all; align guides to the edges of each image; do the same vertically
• add captions, distributing between the guides on each side of the relevant image, and between the graphical bottom and the panel bottom, or the graphical left and the left margin

This is pretty straightforward; the only trick is that there's a common graphical left edge across the panels, which isn't fundamentally necessary, but make things look much, much nicer.

BONUS Illy protips:

• To align an object to another without moving the reference object, select both, then click on the reference object, then align
• To print or export just part of a document (for instance, if there's cruft off the edge of the artboard, or you have braindead graphs from Excel which include a huge invisible bit sticking off the page), draw a rectangle round the bit you want (unfilled and unstroked), probably based on the tiling bounds and/or bounding guides, do Object > Crop Area > Make, do the print or export, then do Object > Crop Area > Release, and delete the rectangle.

BONUS! Illustrator ranting!

• Why is putting an arrowhead on a line a filter, not a basic stroke option like dashing? It's a common thing to do. Why can't you easily adjust the arrowhead after adding it? That's a consequence if it being a filter - it's an operation you perform, not a property you set. Why, really why, does the arrowhead go IN FRONT OF the line, not on it? So if you draw a line that points to something, and add an arrowhead, the arrow now points to a place slightly beyond what you were bloody pointing at. How is that useful?