Illustrator for Beginners

Testing the deep waters of Adobe Illustrator. Find the wallpaper, link to the tutorial and a little help on saving Illustrations in raster (JPEG, GIF and PNG) formats, after the jump. Click “View Complete Article” to view complete article.

Creating JPEG/GIF/PNG in Illustrator.


Illustrator, by default, is set to save for print. That means the vector-based SVG format which retains the math involved so that the image can be stretched without quality loss.
To save in lossy formats such as JPEG/GIF, there is a nifty feature called as “Save for Web” in the “File” menu. Open that and you something scary like:

Need not worry!! Just check out the features in the pic above, and they are explained below:

1. All the major controls are on the right. You can see the format selection as a drop-down menu. Choose from JPEG (millions of colors), GIF (256 colors) and PNG.
2. Quality can be set in a range from 0 to 100. With 100 being the best, but also creating the largest image in terms of memory. This is similar to the Photoshop Save option in case of JPEG.
3. Blur: Blur the image before saving. (duh)
Matte: to matte the image. (duh again) (Look up these terms in Google if needed)
4. Now the most important part that can cause come confusion. (It did for me) If your image is exceeding the size of the artboard (the image size you chose before starting is the artboard. But you can draw anywhere outside it too. This feature is not there in Photoshop). You need to save only the area inside the artboard as the image. But Illustrator tries to create an image of a larger size, including everything you have drawn, even outside the artboard.

TO solve this issue, open the tab “Image Size” as shown in the figure above. Check-mark the option “Clip to Artboard“. This will make illustrator save only the image inside the artboard. Click Apply, and then Save. Done!! You have successfully saved the vector as a Raster!!

You can find the complete tutorial that I followed here.

Please comment on how you like the wallpaper. (Original Design by Chris Spooner). And please be kind, as this is my first Illustrator wallpaper and tutorial.

Signing off,
The Photoshopper