Illustrator® CS4 For Dummies®

Chapter 17. Putting Your Art on the Web

In This Chapter

• Designing for the Web in Illustrator

• Differentiating between raster and vector formats on the Web

• Saving JPEG, GIF, and PNG for the Web

• Exporting Flash and SVG

• Creating slices

Illustrator is the perfect tool for creating and designing graphical elements for Web pages. That statement might surprise you seeing as how most Web graphics are pixel-based, whereas Illustrator is a vector-based graphics tool. In Illustrator, however, the big advantage to creating Web graphics is in the resolution independence of vector-based graphics (as I discuss in Chapter 1). You can create a graphic once, scale it to be any size you need it to be (even use it for print in addition to the Web), and it will always be a high-quality rendition of your creation.

In this chapter, you peer into the myriad ways of preparing Illustrator graphics for the Web and see how to determine the options that best meet the needs of individual graphics. You also find out about how vector-based file formats, such as Flash and SVG, help you put vector-based graphics on the Web while preserving the advantages of vector-based graphics (such as small file size and maximum quality, no matter at what size you view or print the graphics) in the process.

From Illustrator to the Web

When you create a graphic in a pixel-based program, such as Photoshop, you have to decide upfront how big ...