I'm trying to design a gift card in Adobe Illustrator CS5. How do I make the rounded corners of the gift card? I've set the bleed at .125" and width at 3.5" and height at 2.25". How far should the dash line be inset to ensure text is not cut when the gift card is die cut or printed? I appreciate it if somebody would be willing to help.
Draw a rectangle. Apply a fill and remove the stroke. Choose Effect > Stylize > Round Corners and apply the effect. Via the Appearance panel fly-out menu, add a new fill. With the new fill targeted, choose Effect > Distort & Transform > Transform. In the Scale section, set both the Horizontal and Vertical values to 50%. Now for the most important part -- using the 9-point proxy, select one of the 4 corners to apply the scale from (Figure 5). The corner you choose will not have a rounded corner. Click OK to apply the effect. Figure 5. Duplicate the fill and double-click the Transform effect in that fill. Change the origin point in that fill to specify another corner that should have a square corner. Repeat to add a third fill if you'd like. Your Appearance panel should look something like Figure 6. Figure 6. You can save this as a Graphic Style so that you could apply this with a single click. You might even create an entire library of styles that stored different corners of an object as being rounded, for any design task. Of course, these are all graphic styles with multiple fills and effects. And sometimes you need just a single plain flat object with a rounded corner. You could of course draw your rectangle, quickly apply a style, expand the appearance, and then use Pathfinder to create a single final shape. But that's a lot of clicks. So having an action that would do all this for you with a simple keyboard shortcut is better. In fact, being that the holidays are upon us, I've decided to give all of my dedicated readers a gift. Two, actually. The first is a Graphic Style library (Figure 7) you can download. This library contains a plethora of styles with different round corner effects. All you need to do is load the style library and you're good to go. One click will give you the rounded corner(s) of your choice. Feel free to adjust the parameters as you see fit. I used a rather large round corner setting, mainly so the preview in the Graphic Styles panel clearly shows each effect. Figure 7. The second downloadable gift is an Action that expands and combines the effect, leaving you with a flattened object. Once you load the Action, you can use the keyboard shortcut that I've assigned (Command-Shift-F12) or you can apply your own. - Rounded Corner Graphic Style Library - Expand and Combine Action You can also copy and paste any of these shapes into InDesign if you'd like.
I think the rocky mountain training blog can help you out ...check this link http://blog.rockymountaintraining.com/?p=1550