Also created by James, these documents share best practices and helpful templates for setting up some common commercial print jobs, from the very basics of preflight to catch image resolution issues to getting seamless imagery across inside cover/front or back pages accounting for the glue margin/spill on a perfect bound publication (crossover). Be sure to always ask your printer if they have templates and PDF export settings they'd like you to follow, as differences in presses and finishing equipment will vary from what is presented here.

At time of writing, the perfect bound cover setup sheet is not yet updated to a new method of using 3 pages beside each other for the back, spine, and front panels.

Using this method means you can export this as a spread and it will have all of the crop marks on it, unlike a single wide page layout where you use guides. It also makes it possible to easily export separate files of covers and spines to be used in marketing materials.

1. Set up a 3-page document (no facing pages, add your bleed and margin and set pages to the final trim size)
2. Use the Page tool and Properties panel to resize page two to the spine width provided by your printer.
3. Uncheck “Allow Document Pages to Shuffle” in the side menu of the Pages panel
4. Drag the pages to line up next to each other. Your screen should look like:

Check out the full meeting recap for more tips!