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 wanted to export this as a JPEG or a PNG or other images we would go to export, export as, and 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 a higher quality if you're going to get it printed. In this case though let's go into our save as type and we'll select JPEG.
From here we'll see that we have our postcard as a JPEG and we're going to check use art boards. Using art boards means that it will export only the art boards therefore all of the elements outside the art boards such as our color squares or the edges of our shape or the recruiter on the side those won't get exported. In addition we can export either all or we could export any of the individual art boards.
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 JPEG.
To view this we'll go into our unzipped folder and we'll see that we've exported postcard 01 JPEG and postcard 02 JPEG. If we double click we can see example of this. We'll see that we have the postcard on the front and the postcard of our 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 eighth of an inch however if we wanted to increase it 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 at 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 and we'll check use document bleed settings which are set at 1 eighth of an inch.
We'll also select trim marks so that when we print it we'll know where to cut it at the bleed. Finally we'll select Save PDF. If we now go into our unzipped file 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.