Thursday, December 4, 2014

File clean up and preparation for a web portfolio

Today you will want to spend time preparing your files for your own Portfolio to be on the web.

You need to have all your work in file formats that can be displayed in a browser - JPG, PNG or GIF. (Remember the animation?  Remember we had to save as a GIF format?)

As a review, JPEG, PNG and GIF are file formats that compress the original image and put it into a format that can be displayed by browsers from multiple companies.  In other words, you do not need special software to view the file.  JPEG will compress your file but it will also reduce the file size, nice for sending files over communication lines but not nice if you want to preserve the quality of your photos.  PNG has become popular in the last few years because it is "lossless".  Supposedly you will not lose quality.

STEPS:
1.  Open Finder,
and start to organize your files on your computer.

Place all of your content in various folders into your DOCUMENTS folder.

Place all your content into smaller folders for each exercise, like 5_last_first_15x

2.  Open Adobe Illustrator,
3.  Open all of your Illustrator work from the first semester and go to File > Save for Web..

4.  If you have multiple pieces of art in a file, or you want to break up an Illustration, you need to make or edit your art boards.  Click the Artboard icon.


The 3rd art board in my file will be saved because it is "selected".  If you click on the other art boards, you can then go to File > Save for Web... and those art boards will be saved as JPEG or what ever format you select.

5.  You need to try to get your images to a size roughly 1000px x whatever.  In other words, make your images that are super big (over 1000px wide) smaller and the smaller ones you can decide to make them bigger or not.  A smaller image may be better to leave small.

Good Luck!