How To Package Illustrator Files | How To Prepare An Illustrator File For Print

Erin Gipford

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How To Prepare An Illustrator File For Print

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[MUSIC] Hey, everyone! I am back again this week with actually, this is. I would consider this a follow up tutorial. And, of course, my screen is gonna blank out right now, but that’s okay. I just need to tell you a few things. This week’s tutorial is going to be a follow-up from last week. If you were with me last week we. I walked you through the steps to creating what you see on the screen right now, which is a two-page flyer for a charity golf event in Adobe Illustrator and this week after listening to your feedback, I decided to take you to the next step. After you have designed just a flyer in general, it doesn’t have to be this one, and you want to send it off to be printed. I want to walk you through the steps of how to how to get this prepared to send to a print vendor. Mmm, excuse me, there’s two ways to do this. There’s the easy way that is included in. I believe Cs or CC6 no Cs cs6 through the current version CC 18 Creative Cloud. And then I’m gonna also show you the old-school way. In case you aren’t on an older version, It’s not any harder, really, It’s just a couple steps, so I just want to make sure that you know how to correctly send this to a print company in order to have it printed and not get any emails back with questions or fixes or whatever so the first way. I’m going to show you is kind of the autopilot fail-proof. It’s in all the newer versions of Illustrator Creative Cloud, and you just go up to file and down the package and the options menu comes up and the first one is the location of where you want to save this output file – mm-hmm. So I’m going to just choose my desktop right now for easiness, but you save it wherever you want, so we’re gonna select the desktop folder, and then you can Illustrator automatically adds the underscore folder underneath the existing file name, But you can select this and retype whatever you want to name it as and then down here. I just suggest making sure that all of these boxes are checked because, yes, you want it to copy all the links? You want it to collect links in a separate folder and yes, you want it to Relink Relink linked files to document copy fonts. We want the fonts. And we want to create a report so just to be safe. Make sure all of these options are checked and then just hit package and what it’s doing is illustrator is gathering. All of your linked images is gathering all the fonts. It’s gathering all the information of this design that is needed to send it on and be used by another user on another computer. So the it’s gonna it’s gonna grab any font files that you used in the document. It’s gonna grab all the linked images or photos. It’s gonna grab all those original files and collect them all into a nice, neat folder, which is super awesome and this. This little button or this little message box comes up. It says package created successfully awesome to view the package contents. Press show package, So if you don’t. If you’re doing this a lot and you don’t need to see it. Then just hit the don’t show again button, but for the tutorial purposes, we’re gonna look at the package, so I’m gonna click show package and it’s showing you, okay, so up here we’re on, we’re on our desktop and we’re in the charity Golf Flyer template folder, and if you look, it’s collected all the fonts, which we only used one, you might have multiple if you change the fonts, it has it has grabbed the two stock images that we used or that. I used in the template layout. Here’s the report which is just a text document. It’s just showing it just documents all the statistics of the file, and then here’s the actual file itself. So all you would have to do now if you would, you would do this package command and then this folder of contents you probably have to zip it. If you right-click and do send to compressed zipped folder, it will compress it into one file, and then this zip file is what you would want to attach to an email to send either to your client or to the printer, and then they’re gonna be able to access all those needed files for that design, so that’s the easy way that’s the automatic way, and it’s only available in the newer versions of Illustrator, so now that’s all packaged, so here’s the zip file. That’s what you’re going to want to attach because you can’t attach just a folder to email, but I’m gonna go back to our design, and I’m now I’m gonna walk you through the old-school way. So if you don’t have a newer version of Illustrator, this is the step by step that you want to do in order for it to be usable for a printer and the first thing we want to do Is we want to do a ctrl or command a to select everything in the design? You want to make sure that nothing is locked? So maybe go to object and I don’t have anything locked because the option is grayed out, so that means there’s nothing locked, but you want to unlock all and then select all so control a or command a and then you want to go to type create outlines, so creating outlines just turns your fonts into an image or a vector vector lines. So now if you outline the fonts, you no longer have to worry about sending the font files or having any font issues with your printer or client, because when they open it, it’s not going to be looking for font for funds because everything’s outlined now it’s no longer editable because you created outlines, but at this point, if you’re sending it to a printer, it shouldn’t have to be editable, so create outlines is number one. And then you want to go to your link’s palette, which I have a shortcut over here on the right. Otherwise you can go to window and bring up links and your link’s palette is going to show you the images that you have placed within your document, so you can see. I have the the grass, the green grass image on both the front in the back. And then I have the golf ball on the tee. Which is the main image on the front. So if I were to send this to the vendor right now, they would open up this file and illustrator would give them a warning message saying hey. I can’t find these photos because they’re saved on on whoever sent them hard drive, which would be me and so it’s it’s gonna come up, and it’s not gonna recognize where to grab those photos from, and they’re gonna come in blank and to avoid that it’s super simple. We’re just going to select all three images by holding the shift key down and clicking on each one, and then you go up to the menu options in the upper right hand corner and go down to embed images. And that’s gonna bring up another dialog box and there’s just some formatting questions. I always do flattened layers and I also know I just want to do flattened layers to a single image. Nothing else has to be checked, just hit, okay, and then you can see it’s embedding them into the file, and it’s gonna make you say, okay for all of your images, so we have three, so we’re gonna have to say it three times, but then if you look over in your link’s palette, you’ll see now that there’s this little tiny image on the right hand side, and that’s your sign that the image is embedded, so if it’s blank and there’s nothing over here. It means that the image is still linked to its original saving spot wherever you have, it saved on your hard drive or Dropbox, but once you embed it, you’ll get this little thumbnail on the right-hand side, so that you know, it’s the image information is embedded within the illustrator file, so it’s not gonna have to illustrator is not going to be looking for it. It’s it’s in there safe and sound all the information it needs so as long as you outline your font’s number one and embed your images. Now all you have to do is send them either well. I would say both send them. This file saved in illustrator format, so it has a dot. Ai extension and then II save it as a print, ready or printable PDF, which I’m going to show you right now. We already have it saved as an AI AI or EPS is another valid original. File format. So you have your Ai or your EPS and then you’re gonna go to file save as and down here. Instead of Adobe Illustrator, Let’s choose PDF and we’re gonna save it to our desktop and my computer. Slow today, there we go and in your Adobe PDF preset we’re gonna do high quality print because this is going to be a printed piece. We don’t want any compression. We don’t need a small file size. Well, we don’t want a small file size. We want everything full size, and then the only other really important thing is to go down to marks and bleeds, and then we want all printer marks. You can just click that first box and then use document bleed settings, so it’s going to record our bleed and it’s going to record all the printing information for the printer, so with those two boxes checked, hit save PDF and it’s a little bit bigger file, so it’s gonna take a couple seconds here to save, but it’s gonna pop up the PDF, so we can look at it, and we can verify that It has everything that the printer needs on it in the meantime. I hope you guys are having a great week and it’s a little bit rainy here in Wisconsin today, but otherwise, weather has been really good, upper 70s mid 80s and sunny. So there’s no complaints on my end, And I think it’s almost ready. Whoa, we have to waste some time. I should have used this time to mention that. In case you missed the prior tutorial where I actually showed you how to lay this flier out? I will put links below, so check for that. And also the template itself is available for download. If you want to skip the design part and just head right into customizing it with your own information. That’s an option too, so okay, lets. Hopefully it pops up here any second, huh? That was a project. I just got done working on here. We go, let’s zoom out a little bit so we can see. I don’t know why, but my Acrobat is always kind of slow. So this is exactly what we want. We have crop marks up here in the upper or in every corner. We have the registration bulls-eyes which are next to the crop marks we have our. Cmyk guide on here. These are all valid things that any printer will want to have so, and we have the same thing on the second side. Our grayscale bar down here. So if your document looks like this after you save it as a PDF, you’re good to go. I hope that this helps you out and clears up some of the confusion on how to send a file that’s print, ready to a printer and as always go ahead and leave me questions or comments below my email is listed. You can contact me at any time and until next week. I hope you have a great week and thanks for watching.