Export and share your work with confidence

Save editable files and export artboards and assets for printing, sharing, or posting online—right from Illustrator.

Published December 18, 2025

Download files

00:01

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,

00:23

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,

01:09

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.

01:51

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.

03:07

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?

What you’ll learn

Save your working file

Save your editable .AI file to your device or the cloud so you can reopen it and make changes anytime.

Export for print and delivery

Save as PDF to create a clean, sharable version. For best print results, ask your print provider for recommendations.

Export artboards and individual assets

Use Export for Screens to export full artboards — like flyers or ads. For smaller items, open the Asset Export panel to save individual icons or elements. Bonus tip: Export your assets in multiple formats — like PDF, PNG, or SVG — to cover both print and digital uses.

Instruction by: Brian Wood

Try these tutorials with Illustrator

Create illustrations and other graphics with vectors.

View all plans

Cookie Settings

General information

Cookies are small text files stored by your web browser when you use websites. There are also other technologies that can be used for similar purposes like HTML5 Local Storage and local shared objects, web beacons, and embedded scripts. These technologies help us do things like remembering you and your preferences when you return to our sites, measure how you use the website, conduct market research, and gather information about the ads you see and interact with.

If enabled:

We can improve your experience by tailoring the site and the content to things we think might be of interest
We can better keep track of your preferences — like what language you prefer to use
We will better understand your likely interests so we can provide you more relevant Adobe ads and content on non-Adobe websites and in non-Adobe apps
It will help us improve the performance of our website and those of our partners who use the Adobe Experience Cloud

If disabled:

We won’t be able to remember you from session to session so the experience may not be tailored to your interests
You’ll still have access to the content of the site but certain features that depend on cookies may not function
You’ll still see ads, they just may not be as relevant to you