Transcript:
[MUSIC] When you’re saving your artwork or logos in illustrator, you’re going to want to know all the different types of file formats that include transparency. So in this video, I’m going to walk through how I would save out each of those different formats and some of the different features that are in illustrator to save out your artboards or your assets and image files and vectors with a transparent background. So the first thing we want to look at here and I’ve just got the pixel and bracket logo on an artboard. This artboard is 1080 by 1080 pixels, But that part doesn’t really matter quite as much if we look up in the view, drop down and go down to show transparency grid, that’s where we’re going to see what is actually transparent on our document, so that’s how we can make sure that the background isn’t actually white. It’s in fact, transparent, we go back up to view and we can hide that transparency grid, so the other thing we want to be aware of is if this is for print. Then you’re going to want your file type in Cmyk, so when you created it or you might want to convert it and I’ll show you how to cmyk. If it’s for Web, you’re going to want it in RGB or any sort of digital format now, when we save out these files that will convert on its own, depending on the file format that we’re using, so if we look up in the file, drop down and go down to document color mode, that’s where we can convert this between cmyk and RGB. In this case. I’m going to assume you’re looking for some kind of print production exporting, so we’re going to leave it on Cmyk, and when we get to the PNG, that’s going to save as RGB because Png’s are only in RGB color mode. Okay, so the first things first we want to go file, save as that’s shift command or control S. You might want to remember that one and we can save as an illustrator file. That’s the basic working document format for illustrator. It does include transparency. If you’re sending that off and they’re going to need to get into your file and work with the layers or another designer is going to be working on things. That’s the file format you want to save? Next up, I would say is EPS, and this is my favorite format for saving vector artwork with a transparent background or really with or without a transparent background in any anyway. EPS is just the one that I tend to send the one that, um, you know. Printers will use to scale up and scale down your artwork as needed without losing any quality so we can do EPS and we can hit use artboards or we don’t have to hit use artboards. I’m going to go ahead and check it because it’s going to save two files, and I’ll show you what each of those are and one of them is. If you didn’t have it checked and the other one just sort of adds on because I check it, so we’re going to hit save, and that’s going to pop up the EPS options dialog up here you can back, save it to different versions of compatibility if needed more than likely, you’re just going to save it with the illustrator 2020 or whatever your latest illustrator version is. This preview format here is going to be what people can basically see when they preview the file. So I want to include the transparency and tiff. 8-bit Color is fine when we look at some of the other options. I tend to just leave these as default one in particular, though you’ll notice some warnings at the bottom about fonts. You might want to embed your fonts I. I would say ideally, if it’s not a working file and you’re just saving this out and exporting it as EPS. You’re going to want to outline all of your fonts so that whoever is using this document doesn’t run into any font issues because they don’t have the same fonts as you, but you can also embed fonts and so that might be helpful for them to open up the document or print the document or utilize it without running into those issues. That’s all really for the EPS settings. We’re going to hit. OK, it’s going to write the format and then if we look where we saved it into my little assets folder. I actually have two eps files now. This file right here. Notice how there is, no, um, artboard outside of our document. That’s how the EPS file would have saved only this file. If we didn’t check use artboard’s now, I also checked, use artboards and what that did is. It kept the document size, essentially outside of the asset that was on the artboard, so this file here is transparent all the way around, even though it shows white, it is, it does retain the transparency, but it also retains the exact size of my artboard in case. That’s something you want. Now I’ll open this up. You can just click and drag a file like that into Photoshop. It’s going to ask you how you want to rasterize this. It isn’t cmyk. That’s totally fine. Hit, OK, and you’ll see here that it does have all that transparency, where the artboard was so that EPS file may render the preview showing white so that you can see whatever’s on the document, but that’s okay, It does have that transparency as long as your document itself has the transparency now an easier one to share with clients is PDF and we can go same thing save as and well just click down to PDF and hit save now. This is going to pull up the save. Save Adobe PDF options. Not a whole lot here. You need to worry about. If you want to view the PDF after saving, you can click this one because this is just an asset or just a logo. We’re not worried about anything like marks and bleeds. We don’t need to do any sort of compression because this is a vector file, and so this is going to be scalable, we’re not rasterizing. It’s not made up of pixels. It’s it’s like made up of math, that’s. What vector files are compatibility? You might change to the latest acrobat, but you know, if you need to back save once again, that’s where you’re going to do it and you can hit save PDF. And now if we go over to our spot notice here, we got the PDF. We can preview it simple as that. If we open it up, it’s going to open up acrobat reader or acrobat pro. Whatever you have same thing now. All of this looks like it doesn’t have transparency, but it really does. If you pull this PDF into Photoshop, it’s going to open up. It’s going to give you a couple options. You can crop it to the bounding box, which will crop it like without the artboard or you can crop it to the media box, which means with the artboard hit. OK, and it’s going to look exactly the same. In fact, I have two documents open here. One’s the EPS ones, the PDF. They’re exactly the same as each other, so both include transparency back to illustrator last file format. That’s it is used, but in my opinion, it’s rarely used back to save. As, of course, is svg. Now you can save as an SVG file and same thing here you can preserve illustrator editing capabilities if you have other layers and stuff in there or or not, you can just keep it as is it. It will sort of flatten that, in essence, but it will remain a vector with that transparent background, So you can save that one as well, so you have a PDF. You have EPS AI. You have svg all of these? Stay vector so that’s. The important part here is all of those file. Formats are scalable, so depending on if you want to get back in there and utilize it if you take that document into something like Photoshop as long as it’s a smart object, you can scale it up and down. It’s going to retain those crisp edges and then if you’re sending it off the size, then the actual pixel size of the document doesn’t matter as much. You’re just going to need to work with whomever to help them scale it. Let’s say it’s going on a t-shirt to the appropriate sizing now last, but not least here we got PNG now. PNG is a rasterized file means it’s not going to be vector, which means whatever size you save it at that’s the highest quality size that it can be at. You don’t want to scale up from there. You can scale down, but you don’t want to scale up, so you want to make sure you save the appropriate sizes. I saw a question on a video. That was sort of related to this one. Someone asked like what is like a standard size. You should save your P PNG at. Here’s the way I think of it in backward’s terms. I think what’s the size that this is going to be. Where is it going to be represented, right. Is it going to be something that I put as an icon on a social media site? Is it going to be on a website? Is it going to be utilized in some way in a larger format? That’s what I need to know first, and then I can know what size I should save my PNG. As before, you know, that information really doesn’t matter. I mean, save it as a PDF for someone to preview. You don’t need to save a PNG for that purpose, but once you do know that information, there’s a couple ways that we can save first. I can go up to file down to export, not save as down to export you can do save for Web, which is a legacy format. If we look at that really quick and I say legacy formats not correct. It’s a legacy setting, which means it may go away at some point, but it does give you a lot of options over here to save this out or export it and one of them is PNG 24 Which is the highest quality PNG. You can make sure you keep that transparency or you can get rid of the transparency. I don’t know why you would for PNG. I would keep the transparency and then you can adjust the size of it. Exactly right here as you need once you’re done with that, Go down and hit save, and you can just save it into here now. That saves the artboard just like that. The newer version of exporting in illustrator is actually the export assets or in this case export for screens that’s going to pull up the export for screens dialog box assets. We’ll get to in a second, but if we look at artboard’s, we have that artboard and we can check it to make sure it’s selected. If you have multiple artboards, you can export lots of things at once with this, we make sure we select where it’s going to save same folder assets. We can open that location after export, so it’ll just pop open your finder window or or also we can create subfolders here and you can select the subfolders by format or by scale, and that just really is whatever your own needs are. I’m going to keep it on format so that it creates one PNG folder with different sizes in there and with the different scales we can select how the scale is applied. Is it just like a 1 2 or 3x of the document size or do we want to select a very specific width on this or even height or resolution in this case? So I’m going to show you here? This is 1x PNG, which means it’s just going to be the size that my document is which I think is 1080 by 1080 or we can shrink that down to 100 pixels wide. I have these two formats here. You could just have one if you wanted and I’m just going to hit Export Artboard. Now it’s going to create a folder by format, which is PNG. And I have my two sizes here. One is 1080 by 1080 The other is really small because it’s only 100 across now that PNG included the entirety of the artboard. If you just want to export your logo. So it’s like the size of the PNG is the exact size of the logo that’s going to be export assets and if we open up the assets asset export panel. This is kind of a new one in, uh, in illustrator, we can, actually, it says right here. We can drag artwork to this panel to export those assets, so we can drag that artwork over here, and now it does not include that entire artboard. It just includes the asset the element that you drag over to the asset export same kind of stuff down here we can select different scaling and also we can open back up the export for screens dialog. So once we’ve plugged in an asset or even multiple in here, we can open that back up and notice how we have our artboard, but we also have assets and you can see the difference. If you look at that thumbnail, the artboard includes that space, the white space around the entire artboard the asset only includes what we drag in there that vector element, but all the settings are the same and we can hit export asset and it might have put it into this folder. Yeah, because we had it. Go into that PNG folder. But we have asset 1 and asset 2 three X right here. Asset one was one X asset two is going to be three X the size That’s what we had set up in there. So that’s how you can sort of size those up and down, but all in all with Png’s you can make your asset the correct size. You can select a specific size in that asset export either way. That’s how you’re going to get the PNG sizing that you want out of illustrator. And, of course, Png’s include transparency. Now we can do the same thing. I just want to show you. We can’t, I mean, this is all about transparency, but we can do that. Same thing export for screen’s assets are boards doesn’t matter. The format can be jpeg as well out of here. So if for whatever reason you need a jpeg image, you can do that, but it’s going to look like this. With no transparency JPEG has no transparency. So if you add if you export the asset, it’s just going to be this size, but there’s going to be white in there, or if you export the artboard, it’s going to be this size, but all the white you see here is going to be white, so transparency is going to turn into a white background on a jpeg. If you need a rasterized, transparent file, PNG is what you need to save that as or any of those other formats that keep the vector basically keep the vector alive within your document. So those are all the formats and different things and how to save transparency in illustrator. If you guys have any questions if I missed anything or maybe I went too quickly through something. Hit me up down below. But those are all the type of formats that I save out Mainly. I’ll save an EPS ill. Save an ai file, right. Gotta save that working file. I’ll save out an EPS file, And that’s generally what I want. Um, you know, the the post production type the production people to use on whatever it is whether they’re making signage for the wall or they’re putting something on a t-shirt anything like that. I want it to be EPS because I want it to retain that vector format and be scalable, right, that’s high quality. It’s the highest quality you can get. I can save a PDF. If if I have other people attached to the email that I know, maybe don’t have access to the programs or the preview capability, a lot of times that EPS file for like a normal computer like someone that has a PC computer and they’re trying to preview it, They can’t open it. They don’t have a program to open it. They’re not like a creative person. I’ll save the PDF just so they can kind of see what’s going On. Worst case scenario, the PDF does include the vector as well so like the PDF could be used in the same way. The EPS file can be used and then last is that PNG? I really only use PNG. If I know specifically, I need a PNG file for for something in particular, and that’s when I’ll save the the PNG. So all of that said, um, you know? I hope you guys understood most of this. Oh, I know I know a potential instance when I would say PNG, for instance, when we do live streams for Pacers gaming, we’ll save like overlays and stuff for the live stream and a lot of times. I’ll have maybe a space for like the video to show through when the overlay is on top of it, that cutout is transparent, cut out and in a program like OBS or any live streaming program, I’ll put the video behind that transparent cutout and that that image has to be a PNG because that program doesn’t utilize any of these other formats We’ve been talking about, so that’s that’s an example when I would use a PNG. All right, guys, I’m done talking. I’m Spencer, from pixel and bracket, and, uh, see you guys in the next one.