Discover how to effectively export your postcard designs with a thorough walkthrough of the process. Learn about the different ways to export and which format best suits your needs, whether that's JPEG, PNG, or high-quality TIFF for print.
Key Insights
- Before exporting, save your file using ctrl-s. Depending on your needs, you can export your design as a JPEG, PNG or TIFF; JPEGs are good with compression, PNGs offer great transparency, and TIFFs hold a lot of data and are therefore higher quality for print.
- When exporting, check 'use art boards' to ensure only the elements within the art boards are exported. You can choose to export all or individual art boards.
- For printing purposes, observe your document's bleed before exporting and adjust it as necessary. Export the file as a PDF and select 'high-quality print' in the presets. Ensure 'preserve illustrator editing capabilities' is checked for future editing purposes.
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In this video, we'll be exporting our postcard. To export it, we're first going to want to save our file.
We'll hit CTRL + S to save our file. Next, to export, we'll go to File, and if we want to export this as a JPEG, PNG, or other image formats, we would go to Export > Export As. Here, clicking the drop-down, we have multiple different ways that we can export this. For example, JPEGs tend to be good with compression.
PNGs have great transparency. TIFF often holds a lot of data, so it's higher quality if you're going to get it printed. In this case, though, let's go into our Save As type and select JPEG.
From here, we'll see that we have our postcard as a JPEG, and we're going to check Use Artboards. Using Artboards means that it will export only the artboards; therefore, all of the elements outside the artboards—such as our color squares, the edges of our shape, or the recruiter on the side—won't get exported. In addition, we can export either all or any of the individual artboards.
We'll then click Export, and from here, we can change how we'd like to view it. We can change our color model, our quality (meaning that will be a larger file), our resolution, and compression. So let's now click OK, and we've now exported our image as a JPEG.
To view this, we'll go into our unzipped folder, and we'll see that we've exported postcard01.jpg and postcard02.jpg. If we double-click, we can see an example of this. We'll see that we have the postcard front and the postcard back.
We'll then hit the X, and let's export our postcard one other way. To do this, let's first look at our bleed. We'll go to File > Document Setup, and from here, we can change our bleed.
Currently, we have it at 1/8 inch; however, if we want to increase or decrease it, we could do it here. When exporting items for print, it's important to observe the bleed first, as depending on where you're getting printed, there are different specifications. We'll then click OK, and now we're ready to export as a PDF.
To do this, we'll go to File, and rather than exporting, we're technically saving it as a new file, which is why it's important to save your file before exporting it as a PDF. We'll then click Save As, go to Save As type, and select PDF. From here, we'll make sure Use Artboards is checked and click Save.
Next, we'll get a Save Adobe PDF option, and from our presets, we have predetermined presets of how we'd like to export it. In this case, let's select High-Quality Print, and we'll make sure that Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities is checked. From here, we'll simply make one change: going to Marks and Bleeds, we'll check Use Document Bleed Settings, which are set at 1/8 inch.
We'll also select Trim Marks so that when we print, we'll know where to cut it at the bleed. Finally, we'll select Save PDF. If we now go into our unzipped folder, we'll see that we have our postcard PDF here.
We'll double-click to view it, and here we go—we have our exported PDF along with our trim marks, seeing that the bleed extends all the way to the edge so that when we cut at the trim marks, we'll have just our postcard within the artboard. Well done! You'll be uploading that PDF to the portal as your final project. I hope you've enjoyed this course and enjoyed learning Illustrator.