#Data merge in illustrator full#
#Data merge in illustrator plus#
#Data merge in illustrator series#
#Data merge in illustrator mac#

Change the name of this artboard to Card-Basic. At the top of the screen, you’ll see a Name field. When you click the Artboard Tool, the current artboard is highlighted. The Artboard Tool is in your toolbar, and looks like this: Illustrator allows you to create multiple artboards in a single document. Using Artboards to export multiple graphics What if we had cards in our game that don’t have a cost? Or don’t have an attack or defence stat? Let’s separate those objects so that later on, we can easily turn them on or off. We could export this whole layout and save it as a single graphic, but that doesn’t give us much flexibility. The artwork for the card will go here, on a layer behind everything else.Īside from the artwork, we’ve got a place for the card’s cost (blue hexagon), the card’s attack (red) and defence (green), the card’s title (top blue rectangle), the card’s type (middle blue rectangle) and the card’s description (bottom blue rectangle). Note that the area in the middle is transparent. The rest of the document is your safe zone, where all of your card art will be.ĭon’t forget to zoom in on the bottom-right corner and create the same guides there.įor the purposes of this tutorial, I’ve made a very basic card layout. There shouldn’t be any information critical to your game here, but some games use borders with different colours to differentiate card types. This will get cut off after it’s printed. The outermost 1/8″ is your bleed, and should be an extension of your border. Zoom in on the top-left corner of the document and drag off some guides in these positions (hold Shift while creating the guides so they snap to the grid): Turn on grid snapping by selecting View > Snap to Grid. In the Preferences, set the Grid to have a Gridline every 1″, with Subdivisions set to 16: If you are only doing a digital version, set the Color Mode to RGB. If you are planning on doing a printed version of your game, set the Color Mode to CMYK. Add 1/8″ bleed around all four edges of your card, making the total size 2.75″ x 3.75″. Open Adobe Illustrator and create a new document:

If you use Photoshop, export all your assets as PNG files using Adobe Generator.

The instructions below are for Illustrator. NOTE: In the sample project, I’ve included card templates for both Illustrator and Photoshop which one you use is a matter of personal preference. This will help you figure out exactly which elements need to be on each card type, approximately how big they should be, and where on the card they live. You don’t have to have finished artwork to get started, but I’ve found that it’s very helpful to do a basic mockup of your card layout in Illustrator before doing anything else.

Lay out the cards for Tabletop Simulator.

Generate all the cards and export as PDF.

Connect each element in your template to a column in your spreadsheet.

Import the CSV of your spreadsheet into InDesign.

Create the card artwork in Illustrator.

#Data merge in illustrator full#

Full page layout tool, similar to InDesign but way cheaper. You might like this if you’re a programmer? Uses Ruby and installs via the command line.

Hooks directly into The Game Crafter, and does more components than just cards.

Component Studio - paid subscription, web-based.

Cocktail - free, Windows only ( video tutorial).

#Data merge in illustrator mac#

nanDECK - free, Windows only (Linux & Mac with WINE – they’re also working on an online version).

#Data merge in illustrator plus#

Figma plus Google Sheets - free, web-based ( video tutorial).

Inkscape plus the Countersheets extension - free, open source.

Some similar card-building alternatives that I’ve discovered since writing this post:

#Data merge in illustrator series#

Note: This tutorial is an extension of what I learned from Daniel Solis you can read more about his method on BGG, watch his detailed video series on this topic on Skillshare, or his excellent Card at Work playlist on YouTube.