Introduction
Wherever or however you need to use your Illustrator projects, you can share them in a lot of different ways.
Let's suppose you've got a flyer that you need to get printed.
Files that have opened in Illustrator are called your working or native files.
These have .
AI extension on them.
When you save in Illustrator, you save locally on your device or in the Creative Cloud.
If you give the file to someone, they can open it in Illustrator and edit it.
If you need to send your project to someone,
Saving projects as PDF for sharing and print
or maybe to get it printed at a print provider, you can save it as a PDF.
PDF is a great way to be able to share your project, so that someone can see exactly what it looks like and view it, even if they don't have Illustrator.
They just use a free reader.
To save a project as a PDF, with it open, you can choose File, Save As..., choose PDF.
In the PDF options, you can pick your perfect settings.
If you're working with a print provider, you might want to ask them for some recommendations.
Save it, and you've got your PDF.
Suppose you need to save like this flyer, or social ad, or icon or something like that, as a JPEG or PNG, so you can send it to your website or social media or something like that.
You can export content by choosing File,
Exporting artboards for web and social media
Export, Export for Screens...
Now you can export entire artboards here, and maybe that flyer or social ad, you want to export.
I don't want to export the icons as one big artboard, we can do that separately.
You select the artboards you want to use; you pick a folder to save them to, choose a Format.
And this is another way to save these as PDF, but I can also choose JPEG, PNG, SVG and others.
Then you export.
What if you need to export one of these icons separately?
You can see they're all sitting on the same artboard, so we need to pick one of the icons and say let's export just that.
We're going to use the Asset Export panel to do that.
Exporting individual assets with the asset export panel
Go into Window and choose Asset Export.
The whole idea with this panel is that you can drag or add content to the panel, and it just stays in there, and then you can export it from there.
I'm going to take this cat icon and drag it in.
That's a group of content, so it's going to treat it as a single asset.
If they were all separate objects, they would be treated as separate assets that would export.
And I'll do maybe one more icon here.
Then we can rename them by clicking on the name, like Asset 1.
This will be the file name of the asset that gets exported.
Now I can select which ones I want to export.
Come down here, and what you can do is choose a Format for the assets.
You can see a lot of different types of formats here.
I might choose SVG to start.
If I want to export the same assets as another format, you can Add Scale.
This is for another purpose, but I want to export PNG files let's say at 100%.
So, I'll just choose 1x, and then make sure that PNG is chosen.
Now when you export, you'll get an SVG and a PNG of each one of these icons.
Then click Export...
It'll ask you where you want to put them.
Pick that folder and you've got your assets.
Choosing the right formats for different use cases
Like I said, there are a lot of ways to be able to share content you create in Illustrator.
Why don't you go ahead and try saving and exporting in different formats and get some practice?
