Well, yesterday was my "last day of class" at Broward College where I have been attending for the past two years. I was majoring in Graphic Design Technology, also re-taking some algebra courses that were long forgotten since junior high in 1989.

The class who earned the last day description was my digital illustration course. For what it is worth, I love illustration and ended up loving working with Adobe Illustrator, even though I hated Adobe Photoshop.

I woke from a rough night of little sleep on Sunday night with persistent nightmares of me not being finished with my project. Everything from me in class without the project at all to me at home trying to print with the church bells across the street chiming 1:00 pm. I absolutely never leave things to the last minute and this is part of why, since my anxiety is too overwhelming and it makes me just do it in the first place. Unfortunately, this project stretched all the way to the due date. I had a difficult time working on it between all the other things I had to do, and as it was not particularly inspirational, it took me even longer. Come on, a casual dining, family friendly, upscale, fish house wtf? At least two of those criteria are mutually exclusive and if any client ever told me this, I would ask to see their business plan for a good laugh... before turning down the job. Besides, who the hell is stupid enough to design their company logo in three coors? One, perfect, 2, pushing it, 3? Seriously? Well, I had to do it though, since that was the assignment.

Luckily, unlike in my nightmares, my final project was completed and I was ready to print it on Monday morning with time to spare before my 1:00 pm class. My project had taken many twists and turns in its life as a logo and I was preparing the file for print on both of our printers; the epson photo printer for the final full-color proof, and the crappy laser printer for crisper detail on my black only separations.

I had John bring the computer and printers to the dining table, since my back is still hurting and bending or lifting is out of the question at this point. I sat at the table, opened the file, set up everything to print it out, printed the proof on the photo printer. Crap! The colors are a mess! I tweaked it for a total of 3 prints before it as net acceptable, only having to replace two ink cartridges during the job. Searching for the ink cartridges set me back a bit, as did the tweaking and re-printing, but only until about 9:00 am.

Next came the separations. Having used Adobe Illustrator to do separations before, I thought this would be a breeze. I had set up my file with every single color on its own layer, everything was well organized, I know how to use the print dialog to choose to print the separations from the mode menu, so, little to worry about, right?

Notsomuch... As it turns out, if the "mode" does not let you choose "separations" there is a little more to it. You can do like I did and start first by going through the file, looking for anything out of place, layers with hidden elements, incorrect colors, incompatible file names, re saving the file in a different place, trying to print form another machine, etc. etc. etc. until finally turning to the internet!

Now, it was more like 10:00 am, and I was getting very upset, frustrated, and sweaty from my fever that I picked up which obviously did not help with my nightmares last night either.

The internet had so many help and how-to articles on printing color separations in Adobe Illustrator that I could have spent the next few years going through them, except that it would not have helped. They all said the same thing. All of them made assumptions that I was able to actually choose to print the separations from the mode menu!

I finally did work everything out and rushed to class, where I helped at least 5 other students print their work before the teacher came in for the critique.

So, this is what I figured out.


1. The internet is a great place to get information

2. The information obtained on the internet does not always help

3. I should finish and print my projects on a day BEFORE the day they are due

4. The separations option in the "mode" settings in the print dialog of Adobe Illustrator is a product of the PRINTER and not of the driver.

5. If your printer came for free when you ordered some other item, it probably can not print separations.

6. You can trick your printer into printing color separations in Adobe Illustrator by following my tutorial below

7. When you give a presentation on a logo that kind-of sucks, you can waste about 10 minutes telling everyone how to print their separations from a printer that does not want to print separations in Adobe Illustrator.

So, how did I do it?

Here is how I did it, with instructions for getting the printers marks as well, since that was a pretty rough spot for many people in my class. If you do not need printers marks, you can skip right to choosing FILE>PRINT and then proceeding to step 6.


1. Make sure your file is set up how you want it and the colors are spot rather than composite, lest you run the chance of having extra pages in your separations.

2. Make sure that your artboard is set up to outline only the outside of your artwork by going to FILE>DOCUMENT SETUP and entering the size of exactly your desired output. Then scale your artwork to fit in the artboard.

3. Go to FILE>PRINT to open the print dialog.

4. Click on setup and choose "crop artwork to artboard"

5. Click on Marks and Bleed and choose whichever printers marks you need

6. Click on Output in the left column and change the printer from whatever printer you have that does not allow separations to "Adobe PDF"

7. NOW change the output mode from "composite" to "separations"

8. Choose PRINT at the bottom of the print dialog

9. Open the brand new file titled "YOURFILENAME.PDF" where YOURFILENAME is the name of your file.

10. When the open dialog comes up, open and print the first page of the pdf, then open and print the second page, third page, and so on. This may have to be done one page at a time where you close the file after each page prints and re-open it to the following page for every print.

So, there I was with my logo finally printed and I was able to ramble about the printer during my presentation, so it is finally over. I did promise the other students that I would add it in my blog, so future searchers might get to class with their projects printed without the whole ordeal I had to go through.

Enjoy!