Trim marks, or crop marks, are important if you want your artwork or projects in Illustrator printed out. This is because these marks help the printer understand where the artwork should be cut and help to prevent bad cutting that can obstruct or hide your output. But the question is, how can you enable them on Illustrator?

There is a pretty easy mechanism to enable crop marks or trim marks on your artboard on Illustrator. In addition to enabling the trim marks, you can also choose to use an alternative style, such as the Japanese trim marks style, to make it easy to print out your projects.

If you are struggling with adding trim marks to your Illustrator projects – there is no need to panic! This article will explore the uses of trim marks, how they can be added to your Illustrator projects, and how to apply special techniques such as the Japanese trim marks.

What To Do To Enable Trim Marks On Illustrator

One of the core things you can do on Illustrator is used an artboard designed to specific dimensions for printing purposes. However, you can use additional trim marks on your artboards to help the printers understand what part of your artwork to cut after it has been printed. 

Here is what you need to do to add crop marks around an object on your artboard: 

1. Open up your artboard on Illustrator and choose the object. 
2. Select the object you want to create the trim marks around.
3. Now, select the option Object from the menu, and choose to Create Trim Marks.
4. You can also create a live effect with these marks by going to the Effect tab and choosing Crop Marks. 

Your object will now have trim marks around it, which will help the person printing know where to cut so your artwork is preserved and not accidentally removed. Here is a video explaining trim and crop marks in detail: 

How To Add Japanese Trim Marks

In addition to the standard trim marks, you can add Japanese or crop marks to your artwork. The Japanese Style crop marks are defined by doubled lines. This gives a bleed area of around 3 mm to each border around the object. To create such trim marks, you can follow these steps:

1. In the Edit menu, navigate toward Preferences, and then choose General.
2. If you are on macOS, go to the Illustrator menu, choose Preferences, and then General.
3. Then select the option ‘Use Japanese Crop Marks.’
4. Click OK to save all of your changes.

Final Thoughts

Adding trim marks to your artwork can help with the printing, as well as how it looks when it is printed. This is why if you are going to be working on any projects for print – it is essential to use crop or trim marks to ensure that everything works perfectly. 

Thanks to this guide, you now know how to add these marks and which ones are best for your projects on Illustrator.