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in this video we're going to be going over the basics of how to template signage within illustrator for sign agent this is going to be a high level overview but if you want to go more in depth we have a lot of resources on our website in the form of webinars and support articles but this should be enough to get you started so let's look at the first sign this restroom ID that we're going to be looking at here so the very first step whenever we're making a template is to create a top


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layer called preview and we're going to put all of the contents of the sign into it the next thing that we want to do is differentiate between our static elements and our Dynamic elements of this sign so what I mean by that is this all gender message here is going to need to switch between all gender women's men's and so that's going to be a variable Dynamic part of the sign but the band of color at the back or the one at the bottom that's going to be static the only other static piece that we're


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going to be looking at is this restroom uh here the reason being this is a restroom ID so that particular piece of messaging is not going to change so what we're going to do is we're going to separate all of our static elements into a layer that we're going to call background so we'll take the three here and we'll drop that into the background and the reason that we do that is so that when sign agent is reading the file that we create it can basically say that all of these elements it doesn't have to


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worry about it's just going to redraw them Faithfully there's nothing that has to be interpreted here so with that done we can start on the variable aspects of this sign so the first thing to do is really break it down for what are the kinds of information that need to be shown on this sign and so we have the gender of the restroom we have the pictogram as well as we have a room number and then that room number translated into Braille and so with that being the case we are going to want to have for each of


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these a sub-layer that we're going to use and match to a field in sign agent we'll talk a little bit more about that in a minute here so we have our gender our pictogram our room number and then the Braille and so we're going to name each of these sub-layers to match the fields that are in sign agent so in this case we're just going to go through and let's start with gender we're going to take this all gender and we're going to drop it into that layer the reason that we do this is it now is


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going to take the information that is in a field in sign agent and it's going to know exactly how to draw it it knows the font to use the size and the coloring the only thing that we have to tell it now is where to draw it and so for that we use something called a bounding box so a bounding box is a no stroke no fill rectangle that basically tells us what the edges of this particular object on the sign can be so if we had another word in here and it started to extend and it hit the sides at that point the


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bounding box is going to say we've run over and it's going to stop rendering that particular message what we can do is stretch that down to you know accommodate multiple lines but in this case we just need the one the other thing that the bounding box does is it gives us instructions for how to draw this so in this case we're going to care about the justification so I'm going to name this bounding box center comma middle and what that's going to tell us is that it will look inside itself it will see


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that the contents within the Box are this piece of text here and it will find the center middle of the text and it will work its way outward in all directions from there this can be a little easier to see if we change the text to just a single X here and switch over to an outline mode so this is Center middle but let's say instead that we want it to start in the top left what that's going to do is look internally find the top left corner of that X and start drawing to the right run out of room and try and drop down a


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line despite the fact that we have the bounding box all the way over to this side it will only ever go as far left as the text allows so it will find the top left corner of that X and no matter how large we draw the bounding box that's going to be our starting point what that means is that if we want it to be in the top left we would also have to move the X same thing goes for the bottom right the top right whatever our orientation and justification is we need to have the text there to indicate where that


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starting point should be this is one of the reasons that we recommend just having the text be a single capitalized x because the corners are very well defined and easy to read and you're going to make sure that you get your measurements perfect every time so the last thing to notice is that I don't have the bounding box hugging right up against the text itself we actually like to be a little bit uh sloppy in this case give it a little bit of room uh though I know that's hard to convince some designers to do what we do


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that for is the fact that not all fonts are created equal and some will have extra border that they consider to be part of their character space and so we actually will give it a little bit of extra room so that it can account for those differences this is an invisible piece of the sign and so having that little bit of extra play does no harm so we now have the two elements of any piece of text in a template we have the example text that's going to tell us what the the text is going to look like


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and we have the bounding box that tells us where to draw it and more importantly where not to draw it so we've defined that let's move on to the other pieces of text for the sign and we're going to do the exact same thing so we'll start with room number now you'll notice when I name this layer that I'm calling it room underscore number in sign agent the field is going to be called room space number but the reason we do it with an underscore when we're working in illustrator is just


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because we're dealing with computers and so we want this to read as a single object so we put in that underscore so we do that and we're going to take our and we're going to drop it in there so we now have our example text and next up we are going to want to draw our bounding box so let's come and do that and very similarly to what we did with the gender field we're going to say that it starts in the center middle now if I called this middle comma Center that wouldn't matter the order is not


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something that signature cares about we just want to read the information yeah the bounding box name is also going to have other commands that occur in it but we're not going to touch on those in too much depth here for right now we're just going to keep that simple but that's where we can start including other instructions as well so we've got the center middle let's do that now for the Braille so in this case we're going to call it room number Braille and we'll take


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app Rail and drop it in there great uh so we've got the bounding box for that and again we're going to say Center Middle because everything is nice and centered on this sign okay so that's all of the elements of text for this sign the next thing that we want to do is we want to leave a spot for the pictogram now this is what's called A visual field and visual Fields work a little bit different when we're templating them there's no text to use as an example and we're actually going to take this


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pictogram and we're going to upload it as its own separate thing as a visual within sign agent so that's where the information on how to draw this particular image is going to come from which means that when we're drawing the space for it here all we're going to need is a layer called symbol and we're going to draw a bounding box in it now it's important to draw it at the largest that this will ever be so for example the shared restroom is the largest symbol that is going to be going in here


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if I was working with just a single figure and I drew it only wide enough for that this object wouldn't fit and so the uh the all gender would be drawn much smaller because it would have to accommodate a narrower width so I'm going to say that that bounding box is Center Middle and it's a good idea whenever possible to draw the visual bounding boxes as Center Middle just so that if we do like I was saying run into one side of the bounding box before we top out or go to the bottom that it's always centered if it were


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starting in the top left and we ran into a wall before we got all the way down the the image would be off center and so we like to keep it sentimental okay great so now I can actually clear out this object here and I'm ready to go I can now export this file as an SVG and we're going to use the same SVG settings every single time so I'm going to use artboards and these settings are the same we have a support article on them called uh SVG export settings that you can always go to find but once you've set them you can


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essentially forget about it great so we've got that now we can come over to signagent and let's edit this restroom ID it's the only sign in my test organization here so I'm just going to right click and edit and the thing we want to make sure is that all of those pieces of information that we identified have a home in this sign so you can see when I go to fields that I now have symbol room number room number Braille and gender it's important that these match identically to the layer names in sign


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agent of course the the spaces are replaced with underscores and capitalization doesn't matter but spelling and everything else is very important to match um because what it's essentially going to do is say okay I'm looking for a field called room number Braille and that's what I'm going to draw on the sign and here's exactly how I'm going to draw it if we had room number Braille us grade 2 that wouldn't be an identical match and so nothing would show up on the sign


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when we went to render it so we've got our Fields all matching we're going to go to the template and we are going to choose the file that we just created here and it will take a second to render but often when we're very first doing this we're going to come into an error that says hey you don't have the right text uploaded here and so that's where this is going to be really helpful for uploading fonts we can do it directly from here and we're going to add all of these different fonts


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importantly this tells us the exact name that we are needing to add of the font right this is how it is referenced in the SVG file that we're trying to import and so if you're ever having an issue where your font doesn't match when you've uploaded it it might be because we've named it some slightly differently than the SVG thinks it should be named so I'm going to go and upload this and we'll try again in a moment all right for the last of the three I'm going to walk through the process so


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we're going to take our Myriad Pro regular we're going to say that we want to upload this font there we go we're going to paste over that name directly and now all we have to do is select the font file agree that we have the licensing to use it and Save great so now we have all of the fonts for our file ready to go and we can try and re-upload that template file and we can see that with the new fonts uploaded everything saved so let's go to the map and try creating one of these new signs


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that we've done so there we go we've got a restroom here all right so let's try filling out this information and we'll make sure that everything comes through properly so we can see here are our static elements rendering already we've got that top header and footer as well as the word restroom and everything else needs to be filled in so we'll select that all gender pictogram we'll give it the room name one two or no number one two three and for gender we'll say all gender


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we can actually select this as a drop down where we're choosing different options instead of just typing it every time for that go to uh the support article on different field types the translation has also already been set up for the Braille so it will translate the room number again we have support articles all on that for automatic Braille translation but what we're going to see is when we save that it now renders with all of our information so we have the pictogram coming through we have our message


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and we have our Braille with that setup that is the basic building blocks for building any sign within sign agent it can get a lot more complicated but the next steps that I'd recommend looking at would be two features called alignment and repeats the alignment is what will ensure that symbols like this for example are always going to slide up to the edge of the text regardless of how long it might be so that allows us to have flexibility and have different uh elements aligned to one another repeats are what US allow


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us to make um directionals where we have an arrow a destination and a symbol but we have five different examples of them pointing in all different directions with all different information that's where I'd look next but you're well on your way to getting started if you do have any questions the best way to reach us is through our support Channel you can reach us at support signagent.com by email or from the account drop down you can click contact support right here when you're reaching out to us with


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templating questions the best thing to do is actually say I'm working on this particular sign so we can copy the URL directly and then attach the original illustrator template that you've got and we'd be more than happy to help good luck