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 you’ve made some sort of modifi cation;

we’ll do that next.

Figure 1-35 .

2.

Make the smallest of modifi cations. Since

Illustrator in its apparent helpfulness won’t

let us save the fi le without some modifi ca-

tion, we’ll need to trick it into thinking we’ve

made a change. Bring up the Layers panel by

pressing F7, click the

to hide the Artwork

layer, and then click the empty space where

the eyeball was to “wake up” the layer. That

small change is enough for Illustrator to fl ag

the art as modifi ed.

34

Lesson 1: Starting a Document

3.

Choose the Save command. Press Ctrl+S (-S)

or choose File→Save. If the document had been

saved before, Illustrator would update the fi le

on disk. But because it hasn’t, the Save As dia-

log box appears, as in Figure 1-37.

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

Typically, you can save a document by closing it. Just

click

or in the title bar or choose File→Close.

When asked to save the document, click Yes or Save

and away you go. But if you ask me, relying on a

force-save is a trifl e cavalier. If you accidentally click

No or Don’t Save

—

or press the N or D key

—

you

lose your changes with no way to get them back! My

suggestion: When you want to close a document,

fi rst choose File→Save.

4. Choose the desired format. Leave the Save as

Type option (called Format on the Mac) set to

Adobe Illustrator (ai). This saves the artwork

as an everyday native fi le that opens as a titled

document. But what are these other options,

you may wonder?

•

Illustrator EPS ( eps) saves the fi le in a format called Encap-

sulated PostScript. For years, this format was the cross-

platform, cross-application standard—but it’s falling out

of favor now that Adobe is dominating the design world

with the Creative Suite. This format is most useful for back-

ward compatibility with legacy versions of programs, most

notably QuarkXPress.

• Adobe Illustrator Template ( ait) saves the fi le as a template

fi le, causing future openings of the fi le to open a copy rather

than the original. The only way to change a template fi le is

to open a copy, make the modifi cations, and then resave

the fi le as a template over the original.

•

Adobe PDF ( pdf) outputs the fi le to Adobe’s ubiquitous

Portable Document Format. This fi le is viewable by any-

one with Mac OS X and any Windows user who has Adobe

Reader installed.

• FXG ( fxg) is a new format, short for Flash XML Graphics.

It’s designed specifi cally as an interchange format between

Illustrator, Flash, and Flex (Adobe’s Internet application

development framework).

Figure 1-36 .

35

Saving Your Artwork