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Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium How-Tos: Working with Illustrator

Feb 16, 2011

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#35 Creating Crisp Artwork for the Web

With its strong typographic capabilities, fast and flexible drawing capabilities, and tight integration with Flash CS5 Professional, Illustrator is a great tool for Web graphics creation. Since it started as a resolution-independent application for print, however, there are some things you need to know to properly work with Illustrator to create artwork for the Web.

Even though all artwork appears razor-sharp at any magnification in Illustrator, the same is not true when that art is rasterized (converted from vectors to pixels) for the Web. Artwork gets fuzzy when exported for the Web due to anti-aliasing, which blurs edges to smooth the appearance to the naked eye (Figure 35a). Illustrator CS5 includes a new Pixel Preview (View > Pixel Preview) mode that allows you to see just what your artwork will look like when rasterized.

Figure 35a Artwork as it normally appears in Illustrator (top) and the same artwork after it's been rasterized (bottom).

But seeing a problem with rasterization isn't much help if you can't fix it. Fortunately, there are new Illustrator features for that, too. The first is the Align to Pixel Grid option, which is available either for individual objects (Figure 35b), or on a document-wide basis. To align one or more objects to the pixel grid, select the objects, open the Transform panel (Window > Transform), and select the Align to Pixel Grid check box. To make this behavior persistent throughout your document, choose Align New Objects to Pixel Grid from the Transform panel menu.

Figure 35b The same rasterized buttons from Figure 35a aligned to the pixel grid. Notice the improvements around the edges of each button.

Aligning artwork to the pixel grid solves your rasterization problems for drawn shapes, but typography requires extra attention. The Character panel (Window > Type > Character) in Illustrator CS5 now includes the same type anti-aliasing options that Photoshop has had for many versions (Figure 35c). Choosing the correct option will depend entirely on the typeface in use and its size, color, and interaction with the colors around it.

Figure 35c Anti-aliasing options in the fully expanded Character panel (left) and the results of each setting (right).

Getting Pixel Dimensions You Can Trust

When you select an object with a stroke applied to it in Illustrator, the Control panel displays the height and width for the path used to draw that object, not for the full extent of the stroke applied to that path (meaning the thickness beyond the path edge). Illustrator strokes, by default, are distributed along both sides of the path. This means you won't get accurate pixel dimensions for stroked artwork, since strokes add pixels to an object's overall size.

When you're working in a document that's intended for the Web, you can compensate for this discrepancy by changing a preference. In the General options of Illustrator's Preferences dialog, select the Use Preview Bounds check box to force all dimensions displayed for an object to include its outermost boundaries, not just the extent of its path.

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