Illustration Tutorial: How to Export Your Artwork Step by Step

Learn the basic steps to export a finished illustration project with Silvio Díaz Labrador in three different ways

Exporting a piece of artwork correctly is a vital step in any graphic design or digital illustration project. There is no point in spending hours preparing and polishing a piece in Adobe Illustrator, if afterwards its print or the resulting file loses quality and detracts from your work.

That is why graphic designer and art director Silvio Díaz Labrador gives us these key tips to create our projects' final artworks in three different ways according to our needs. Learn how to do it without sacrificing the quality of your work with the following tutorial:

Create a final artwork in 3 different ways

1. Final artwork for two-ink printing

The first step in preparing a final artwork on Illustrator for a two-color print is to click on Save as and choose PDF file as the output format.

This will open a context menu window which will allow us to customize and modify the type of file we are going to create. For this type of print, in the drop-down menu of the Adobe PDF Presets field, choose High Quality Print, and check the Preserve Illustrator editing capabilities box. This way, the resulting file will be editable, and can be modified if adjustments are needed.

Next, go to the tab Marks and Bleed, where you will choose All printer marks as this is usually the most advisable option, although it is always useful to discuss this with the printer to make sure. Also select Use document bleed settings to preserve file margins.

Once these settings have been made, click on Save PDF and you will create a PDF for two-ink print output, with flat colors.

2. Final artwork for four-color printing (CMYK)

To prepare a final artwork for four-color printing–i.e. CMYK–we will repeat the above process but instead of selecting High Quality Printing from the drop-down menu in the Adobe PDF Presets field, we will choose the option Press Quality.

All other options will be kept the same as for two-color printing: both marks and bleed settings. It should be noted that if you want to create a PDF file for on-screen viewing, you can use the Output tab to display the options in Target and choose RGB instead of CMYK.

3. Final art for screens

If, on the other hand, we want to export artwork for screens, for example to publish on social networks such as Instagram, the saving process is different. Click on File and, instead of Save as, select Export as, always remembering to check the option Use desktop.

If we're exporting an illustration, we'll have two formatting options: PNG, which groups flat colors very well, and JPG, which has a very high compression factor at the expense of some color quality.

Since PNG will be the ideal format to preserve the highest possible quality, we will choose it and, when exporting, we will make sure to select Medium quality. This way, it will look its best on mobile phones, normal screens and retinal screens.

Now you know how to create a final artwork in three different ways; always remember to take into account the media in which your work is going to be printed, the format needed by the printer or the type of digital file if it is a design for the Internet.

Did you like this tutorial? Remember that you can learn the keys to design and how to create a graphic campaign through illustrations with on Silvio Díaz Labrador's online course Graphic Design Basics for Illustrators.

You may also like:

- Final Art: Preparation of Files for Printing, a course by Chack Robles
- Introduction to Adobe Illustrator, a course by Aarón Martínez
- Adobe Illustrator for Graphic Design, a course by Valeria Dubin
- Adobe Photoshop for Illustration, a course by Gemma Román