Illustrator - Disk Template

DVD Disk Template:

The first stage of creating my disk overlay was creating a template. It was important I created a guide which would allow me to simply add elements and arrange them to fit within my template. This prevented me from worrying about sizes when creating different elements.

As in my previous template for my DVD inlay it was important I added a bleed area. I didn’t create a safety area this time as this element would not be cut out so it shouldn’t need any more guides to improve its accuracy. The bleed area I created was 4mm. This was slightly larger than that of my DVD inlay but this would help to act as a safety area as well and hence I made this slightly thicker.

In order to create a template which was the correct size I did some online research into the size of a disk. I used a template taken from ‘Wizbit Internet Services’. This can be seen below. This gave me all of the relevant dimensions I needed to create my template. The height of my disk template is 125.5mm and the width is 117.5mm. These are the main two measurements and include the bleed area. Within this large circle I needed to make a smaller circle for the hub and the stacking ring. The hub is the smallest circle and is hollow with the stacking ring being around the edge of this. This can be left blank or covered with the overlay. This would vary from one disk to another. The hub of my disk is 8.7mm and the stacking ring is slightly larger at 16.7mm.

 

 

 



 

I created my template using illustrator. I firstly opened a new document. I changed the settings within this new document dialog box to the following: I only need one art board and hence I changed this setting to one. The art board is Illustrators equivalent to a workspace in Photoshop. For obvious reasons I only needed one. Next I needed to set the size of my art board. I needed my disk to comfortably sit on this and hence it had to be bigger than the dimensions I mentioned above. For this reason I set my art board to 210mm by 210mm. This gives me space around the edge of my disk to overlap images and elements. I can then use clipping masks to make them fit my disk. I think I will benefit from having this extra space around my disk template. Unlike Photoshop Illustrator uses the CMYK colour mode as standard. This I have changed to RGB. RGB will give me a better view of the colours I am using for my disk and then these can be converted if I was to use this disk in industry. All other features I have left to the default.

Now I have my art board set up I needed to start thinking about my template itself. The first thing I did was create guides to find the centre of my art board. This allowed me to create a circle right in the centre. To create these guides I simply ensured the rulers were visible around my art board. (If these are not visible you can show these by going to View, Rulers, Show Rulers, these are hidden in the same way). I then simply dragged the guide from the vertical and horizontal ruler. It is very difficult to achieve accurate locations when dragging these rulers free hand and hence I used the tool along the top bar of the screen to set these to the centre. This was 105mm both in horizontally and vertically.

To create the circles I need for my disk template I used the Ellipse Tool in the shapes tool option. With the Ellipse Tool selected I used the ‘Alt’ and ‘Shift’ keys on the keyboard and took my curser to the centre point of my crossed guides. I then clicked and dragged out my ellipse to a reasonable size. To make this ellipse the exact size I selected the already drawn ellipse and then used the transform tools to adjust the size. My next step was making this ellipse a guide. To achieve this I went to View, Guides and then finally Make Guides. This then set my new ellipse as a guide. I then used the same path to lock my guides in order to start this process again and make my next ellipse. I repeated these steps until I had created all of my disk template. The final result can be seen below.