Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

Saving Your Artwork

Illustrator is packed with so many tools, panels, and commands that

it can be a bit dizzying at fi rst. But there’s one absolutely critical

command in the program, the Save command. Without File→Save,

you couldn’t preserve your hard-earned art. In this exercise, you’ll

learn how to use the Save command in Illustrator as well as your

different options for saving a fi le.

1.

Open a document. Choose File→Open or press

Ctrl+O (-O on the Mac). Open the fi le Urban chaos.ait

in the Lesson 01 folder inside Lesson Files-AIcs5 1on1

This piece of artwork comes to us from iStockphoto.com illustra-

tor Che McPherson and is pictured in Figure 1-35. Imagine that

you just created this fi le; now you’re ready to save it for posterity.

P E A R L O F W I S D O M

Because this fi le was last saved as a template

(hence the .ait extension), Illustrator opens

an untitled copy of the fi le. This prevents

you from accidentally saving over the

original. More importantly where this

exercise is concerned, it exactly simulates

the experience you would have if you were

to create a new document

—

so far as

Illustrator is concerned, the document

has never been saved. Unfortunately,

Illustrator also considers a newly made

document, or a freshly opened copy from a

template, as unmodifi ed

—

and therefore does

not make the File→Save command available to

you until