Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Exporting Artwork for the Web

These days, it’s entirely possible your Illustrator artwork will never

see the printed page. And even if your work started as a print docu-

ment, it’s important that you know how to prepare your artwork

for a digital existence beyond. Adobe realizes this as well, and has

created an ever-evolving set of tools designed to optimize your il-

lustrations for inclusion on a Web page, emailing to a colleague, or

use in a digital media scenario where quality and fi le size are com-

peting for primacy. You may still start with print as your primary

output expectation, but we’d better have a fl ight plan in place for

exploring the digital universe.

To live in a fi le format that’s Web-compatible, your image will need

to be rasterized, that is converted to pixels. Pixels are the medium

of the digital display, and to exist in the great beyond, your artwork

requires conversion to a pixel-friendly format like JPEG, GIF, or

PNG. In this particular exercise, we’ll be working with a complex

graphic with a continuous tone background, so JPEG is going to be

our best option. And Adobe’s not-so-gracefully but oh-so-descrip-

tively named command, Save for Web and Devices, provides just

the right atmosphere for making this transition.

1.

Open a fi le. Open the fi le called Destination Internet.

ai which you can fi nd by navigating to the Lesson 12

folder inside Files-AIcs5 1on1. As ...