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Creating a Sample Page in Illustrator

It’s that time again… time to find that killer job/internship! A good way to include more sample projects with your resume is to create a sample page and print it on our color printer. Very impressive! But, it’s not as easy as simply copying the objects and images and pasting it into an Illustrator file.

What happens when an Illustrator file is created is that you have a series of objects and a series of placed images. Most of the time, the images are linked to rather than contained within that Illustrator file, and that is GOOD; too many problems are caused by including files in the illustrator file that are way too large. But for the purpose of creating a sample page, this is a problem rather than a benefit.

When you look at the total file size of an Illustrator (or PageMaker, or Quark) document, you need to look at the total size of all of the placed images rather than simply the file size of the Illustrator document (which will be fairly small). Your Illustrator file may be 212K, but you could have upwards of 35MB in images placed. When you resize your total image, you are just resizing what you have created in Illustrator, not the linked images! Even though you may have resized your 8.5 x 11 file down to 2 inches wide, it still has the original file size, since the images have not actually changed. This can be a large problem when you realize that the more small samples you have on a page, the larger the total file size you will have. For example, the file that I am using for this tutorial has a total size of 42MB. This includes the three images that I used, plus the file size of the Illustrator file. If I had four comparable publications to include, I’d end up with a file size of 168MB, which not only will not print on the color printer, is a vast waste of space.

Confused yet? So, how can you make this work so that the images can be reduced in file size and actually print on the Splash printer? Through trial and error, I’ve come up with a way to make this work.

First, copy all of the files you’d like to use in the sample page to the hard drive. Most of you will have several zip disks, and doing this before you start will save lots of time and effort and will help you avoid accidentally replacing your good copy. When you are finished, we can start creating the page.

Open Illustrator. You will want to set up your document first, of course, setting the margins and the paper size and orientation. When you have set up the document, save it to the hard drive (not a zip). You will want to name it something like "samplepage.ai" so that you are aware that it is your target document. Go ahead and create your basic layout, adding in your text and adding image placeholders to determine the size of the sample images. When the layout is fairly complete, you can start resizing the samples.

Open the first file you’d like to resize. You will want to resave it. Choose File> Save as…. Save it under a different name, such as file-smaller.ai and into a new folder. After you put in the new name and click the Save button, you are presented with another dialog box. Note the checkbox option to Include Placed Files, and make sure that it is NOT checked.

When the file has saved, you can now resize the total object. You will want to choose Select All from the Edit menu. Then double-click the resize tool. You can enter numeric scaling information. Enter the scale you’d like (you can click the Preview option to see how large the object will be at that scale), and click the Okay button to accept it. You can use the resize tool manually now to make sure that the total object is the exact size you need. I’m going to scale my file to 20%.

When you have scaled the object, you will want to resave the file. Again, make sure that the Include placed files option is NOT checked.

Now comes the tricky part. You will need to open all of the images you’ve linked to in this document. Open Photoshop, and open one of your images. Under Image Size, change the size to 20%, or whatever scale matches the scale of the illustrator file. Choose Save As… from the File menu, and save the resized file to the new folder that you created earlier. Repeat this process for each image. When you are finished resizing the images, quit Photoshop.

In Illustrator, open the smaller Illustrator file. We need to replace the current, full-size images with the images we just resized. Open the Links palette. You can find it under the Windows menu > Show Links.

The Links palette gives you a list of all the images your document links to, in a format not unlike the Layers palette in Photoshop. You will want to select the image on the list, and click the Links options menu (it looks like this: 4), and select Replace. You will be prompted to find the file you want to replace the current image. Find the smaller image that corresponds to the file, and click the place button. Repeat this for all of your linked images.

When all images are replaced, save the file. We will want to do one more step before putting this file into our sample page.

In the same Links palette, you will want to select each image again, and, this time, select the Embed Image command from the Link Options menu.

This will embed the images directly into your illustrator document (which is fine for these small files, but you will not want to do this for your full-size publications). Now we will want to resave our file under a different name, such as file-smaller-embed.ai. This way I know that this is the file with the images embedded.

Once the file is saved, we want to copy it to the sample file. In the current file, choose Select-all from the Edit menu, and copy. Open the target file, samplepage.ai, and paste the copy. Save the file.

You will need to repeat this for each publication you’d like to include in your sample page.

Now you have an easy, and cost effective way to provide more samples of your work to prospective employers!