Recently our school division announced that they would be selling shirts to commemorate pride week, which happens this year May 24th to June 2nd. It looks like this:

My immediate thought was that our talented students could have come up with something a little better than that!

We would like to come up with something different which will be used and sold at our school. You could be the designer and get free stuff!

Your creativity and ideas are welcome. You could use a Westwood logo or the school division logo, which you can get from my website: Westwood logos. Remember that vector logos (.ai, .svg, .eps) will work best.

You might also want a pride flag. There is a good one in the HAND OUT FOLDER

You could look at an organization like Pride Winnipeg for information and ideas.

You can use whatever program you like to design this, but Illustrator is generally the best choice for a logo. Set up your page to be 8.5 inches by 11 inches, and if you’re using Photoshop, make sure the resolution is 300 pixels/inch.

 

Previously you had a bit of practice taking photos, but I didn’t give you many guidelines and didn’t ask to see the photos that you took. Today that changes. You will be asked to come up with 3 “good” photos and hand them in, explaining what you like about them.

If your camera is set to take photos in the RAW format, you will have more ability to edit and correct, but you will have to export or convert them before you can use those photos in another program.

If you set your camera to take photos as .jpg files, they are easier to work with, but harder to edit.

You can use the MENU button on your camera to change modes if you wish.

TWO THINGS to consider that will help you take GOOD photos:

1. Photography is all about LIGHT. The name literally means LIGHT DRAWING. Pay attention to the type of light and where it’s coming from. Sunlight is the brightest, best light available. Your eye can adjust to lower light levels better than your camera can. Just because it looks bright enough in an area to your eye, that does not mean your camera can get enough light. Look for places that are very bright. Then look for where the light is coming from and make sure it is directed onto your…
2. SUBJECT is important. What are you taking a photo of? Is it clear and obvious? If there are distracting and annoying elements that draw attention away from the actual subject, that is a problem that you want to consider. The easiest way to cut out annoying or distracting elements would be to zoom in or move closer/to a different viewpoint.

LIGHTROOM

Probably the easiest way to import your photos and edit them is in Lightroom. There are actually two programs, Lightroom and Lightroom Classic. It’s confusing. They each have advantages.

Lightroom might be the easiest to start with:

To see the important bar on the left side of the screen, press the letter p on your keyboard to access Photos or open this little icon at the top left:

To get your photos from your card into the programme, you need to Import them. You can do that with the Add Photos button at the top:

Then find the card:

or the File menu

Once you find your card, you should see all of the photos on there. They may not all be yours, so you may wish to deselect some of them. You can always delete some later if you wish.

Once you import your photos, you may wish to EDIT them. You can press the letter E on your keyboard or find this icon:

There’s a button that corrects photos automatically that usually does a great job:

Feel free to mess around with any of those settings though! The cool thing about a RAW file is that you aren’t actually changing it, so you can always go back to the original image. No matter what changes you make, they’re always reversible on a RAW file, even if you close the program!

Once you are happy with a photo, you need to Export it to another format to make it usable in more programs:

.jpg is the most common image type, so will work in the most places/programs

 

When you have THREE GOOD PHOTOS, I want you to hand them in WITH A REFLECTION!

Answer the following questions:

1) What is your subject/what are you taking a photo of?

2) What kind of light was present and which direction was it coming from?

3) What do you like about your photo? What stands out to you?

Put that together in a document or PowerPoint or some such thing and hand it into your OneDrive hand-in folder!

The 2024 graduating class needs your help! It’s time to start thinking about buying a ticket for this year’s graduation and we need a new design for those tickets.

Here’s what we had last year:

and here’s what we had the year before that:

You, being the talented designer that you are, could surely come up with something even more interesting!

The first step is to design the actual ticket. Later you’ll put a bunch on a sheet and cut them out.

The setup for one ticket is:

3.5 in by 2 inches, plus a .25 inch bleed

These could be designed in Illustrator or InDesign. If you want to use Photoshop, make sure you are setting up your page to be 4 inches by 2.5 inches, and leaving a margin that is about .5 inches on all sides (.25 inch bleed & .25 inch margin). (if you need help with setting up Photoshop properly, check THIS POST. The size is different, so the measurements will change, but the idea is the same.)

You’ll design the front and the back of the ticket, so make sure you have two pages/artboards! You do not need Facing Pages if you’re using InDesign.

InDesign:

Illustrator:

Information to include:

WESTWOOD COLLEGIATE
Graduation Dinner
Thursday, June 27th, 2024
Doors/Reception 5:00 PM, Dinner 6:00 PM
Safe Grad to follow at 10 PM
Victoria Inn & Convention Centre
1808 Wellington Ave.
$75.00 per person (non-refundable)
Table #:

You don’t have a lot of space and there’s a lot of text to include, so don’t add in too much more, but feel free to work a logo in or just use shapes & colours and more interesting fonts to make the ticket look much more appealing!

some samples from previous students (note that the details are not correct for this year!):

 

Before we get too carried away with Illustrator, let’s slow down and practice some of the amazing tools available in the program.

You’ll work through some tutorials. Show me the completed examples when you are done.

Tutorial 1: Create with Drawing tools

You can download the practice files HERE

Tutorial 2: Start creating with the Pen tool

You can download the practice files HERE

Tutorial 3: Edit Paths you Draw

You can download the practice files HERE

Tutorial 4: Transform and edit artwork

You can download the practice files HERE

 

I know it’s only March and the snow isn’t gone yet, but it’s that time of year when my thoughts start to drift toward summer, my favourite time of year. One of my very favourite things about the summer is that I get to visit a lot of cool music festivals.

I would like you to design a poster like one that would be used to advertise an upcoming music festival. Yours doesn’t have to be a music festival, but it should contain similar information. You could promote whatever type of event you like, or just make a poster like the ones you’d see advertising a new movie.

You could visit my website or the Westwood site if you want to make a poster that we can use to advertise an upcoming event, like FLOTA, our family of schools concert, the junior musical (Lion King Junior), graduation, the graduation pow-wow, or just about anything else!

Make your work CRAP!

By now you should know about the 4 main principles of design (aka CRAP or CARP or PARC), Contrast, Repetition, Alignment, and Proximity.

If you need a review, this is a  pretty good one (although there are many on YouTube)

 

Here are a few different examples of different types of posters that would work for this assignment:

 

and some examples from previous classes:

 

You should notice that these posters contain a lot of information that is categorized/organized into levels of importance. Use Contrast and different sizes/colours to organize your information and show what information is most important and what could be considered the “fine print”/more minor details.

Event posters generally use appealing photographs/images and bright colours to draw attention.

For your details, think of the 4 of the 5 Ws, (who, what, when, where – you probably don’t need to worry about why or how…)

SIZE:

11 inches by 17 inches (or 17 by 11)

make sure you have a .25 inch bleed and extend your colour/images to that bleed line. We will cut off that part, so don’t put anything important in that area.

Remember to SAVE your file in ONEDRIVE with a good file name (EventPoster.ind would be a good example)

Remember to download HIGH QUALITY images and PLACE them properly

Remember to scale proportionally. Do not enlarge small .jpg files.

Remember to make your poster APPEALING and INTERESTING. A good poster should catch the attention of people walking by. Make it colourful and exciting.

When you think you’re done, SHOW IT TO SOMEONE to get feedback. If that person has no suggestions, ASK SOMEONE ELSE!

When you’re sure your poster is appealing, interesting, and useful, PACKAGE everything together and hand it in for marking!

Using your newfound Photoshop skills, you will design your very own trading card in the style of a hockey/baseball/football/basketball card, or perhaps a Pokemon style card. Your job is to be creative and original while using something like that as inspiration. You will design both the front and the back of the card.

Here is my example:

You can almost certainly come up with something better than that! I have a few sample cards on my desk that you could look at, or just google a hockey card and see what one could look like.

You DO NOT have to use yourself as the subject of the card, although that would be a lot of fun! You are encouraged to make one about yourself, of course, but can make one about your favourite athlete/musician/Pokemon, etc.

A standard trading card is about 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches. You can decide whether to design it in Portrait orientation (tall) or Landscape (wide.) Make sure your resolution is 300 pixels/inch and you are using the CMYK color mode.

If you come up with something good, I’ll even print it out and give it to you! When we cut them out, it is difficult to cut precisely on the line, so we often end up with a strip of white paper on the outside. To prevent this, we add in something called a BLEED, which is an extra bit of the background that extends past the edge of the intended page. This area gets cut off, so you don’t want to put anything important in there.

We actually want our card to be 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches, but we’ll add in an extra .25 inch bleed on all sides:

By default, Photoshop files always start out with one page/canvas, but you can add another.

If you go into the Layer menu, then choose New, then Artboard…

You can have multiple pages/canvases/artboards, which show up in the Layers panel

You’ll notice two pages that you can work on side-by-side:

 

In order to properly keep that Bleed area separate, you need to set up some Guides. In order to do that, you need to be able to see your Rulers.

Go into the View menu and choose Rulers (or press Ctrl + R)

Click on the ruler at the top of the page and pull down. Do this OFF of your page (beside it)

Drag down until you’re just onto your page.

You should see a light blue line appear on your page. With the Move tool active (press v on your keyboard), click on the line/Guide to select it. Then Right-click and choose Edit Selected Guides:

The top guide should be .25 inch into the page.

Repeat this process, placing guides at the top and bottom of the page. The next one should be at 3.75 inches

If you’ve done it correctly, those guides will extend out onto both artboards and all you’ll need to do is add the vertical guides on both sides

Drag from the left ruler onto the page and set a guide at .25 in

And another at 2.75 in

The other artboard requires a bit of math because the spacing is a bit odd, but lucky for you, I’ve done it for you! Put one at 3.583 in

and a final one at 6.083 in

In the end, you should see something like this, with guides marking off that bleed area on the front and back of the card

 

Those guides are just for your information. They will not appear on the printed card!

When you create your background, make sure it extends out to the edge of the page. Remember that the section between the guide and the edge of the page is designed to be cut off, so never put anything important in there!

Remember that the guides will be the edge of the page when cut, so never put anything important too close to those guides! Keep a bit of a margin area blank all the way around.

Here’s what that might look like:

Anything important should be in that area that I have grey (Safe area.)

 

 

 

It’s now time to start with a simple look at one of the more complicated but important programs we’ll look at this year, Adobe Illustrator.

Illustrator and Photoshop create and manipulate images in very different ways. In order to understand this, you need to know the difference between RASTER and VECTOR images.

Here’s a good tutorial that will help demonstrate this. Click THIS LINK, then find the button that says Begin Tutorial in Illustrator

 

THIS TUTORIAL will take you on a tour of the app. CLICK THIS LINK, then find the button that says Begin Tutorial in Illustrator

Here are some tutorials that will help you get started:

Get to know Illustrator tutorial

 

Get started with shapes. Read the instructions below or check out THIS TUTORIAL. CLICK THIS LINK, then find the button that says Begin Tutorial in Illustrator

Adding and editing Text in Illustrator is very similar to Photoshop. For some great information, check out THIS TUTORIAL. CLICK THIS LINK, then find the button that says Begin Tutorial in Illustrator

 

Open Illustrator

The first step is to create a new file

Make your file 14 inches wide and 6 inches tall. You can easily change the size later if you need to.

Before you even start your work, you should always SAVE your work. In this case, clicking Save (Ctrl + S) OR Save As will do the same thing:

When you save your work, make sure it has a name that reflects the contents.

Make sure you save your work On your computer.

Hopefully you have already opened OneDrive today. If not, do that now!

Save your work into your OneDrive folder. You might even have a Graphic Tech folder to organize your work (NOT the one with your name on it that you use to hand things in. Only put your work in there when it is DONE)

You don’t need to change anything in this box:

Up on the top right of the Illustrator window, you will be able to choose the way your panels in the program are laid out. You can always change this later. I like my Workspace to be set on Essentials Classic. If you want your screen to look like mine, choose that Workspace. You are free to choose whichever one you like, but keep in mind that your screen will look different than mine.

Up across the top of the screen you will see the program menus. Perhaps the most important one is the Window menu. If you can’t find a panel or want to change your workspace, go there.

There are a couple of ways to look at your primary toolbar. For right now, mine will be set to Basic.

The basic toolbar usually shows up in one column like this:

But if you want, you can change it to two columns with the little arrow at the top:

There are many more tools that you can see by clicking the three dots at the bottom:

The tool we use the most is the Selection Tool. It looks like a grey arrow outlined with white. You can activate it by pressing the letter v on your keyboard:

NOTE: There is another selection tool that we won’t use nearly as often. It’s the one that’s filled in with white. That is the Direct Selection tool, and it works very differently. We’ll ignore that one for now:

The other tools we’ll work with for now are the shape tools. Yours will probably look like a rectangle. You can activate that tool by pressing m on your keyboard:

If you hold your mouse button down on that tool, you’ll see the other shape tools hiding underneath:

If you wish, you can Float those tools by clicking the tiny triangle on the right.

This will pop out a separate panel that you can move around

On the right side of your screen, you will find another super important panel, Properties

Each shape is made up of two parts, the Fill and the Stroke. The Stroke is the outline and the Fill is what’s in the middle.

If I draw a shape with those Properties, my rectangle will have a black outline and will be filled in with white:

To change the Fill, click on the little square next to Fill. Choose a colour to fill your shape in with:

You could also change the outline by clicking on the Stroke square (swatch)

You could also make that outline thicker or thinner

My rectangle now looks like this:

NOTE: if you want to draw a square instead of a rectangle, hold SHIFT as you drag out your shape:

I really recommend that you turn OFF the Stroke for this assignment. Pick a fill colour and turn the stroke off by choosing the empty white square with the diagonal red line through it:

To move or resize a shape, use the Selection Tool

If you look in one of the corners of a rectangle, you will see a tiny dot. If you click that dot and drag it in, you can round off the corners of your shape:

If you want to rotate a shape, move the Selection tool outside of a corner and click and drag to rotate:

Another interesting tool is the Polygon Tool. This one draws flat sided shapes but you can choose how many sides it has. Choose that tool on either the main or floating tool bar:

If you want, you can double click on your page (the Artboard) to choose how many sides before you draw your shape. You can also choose the size.

OR, you can draw the shape first.

On the right side of the shape, you’ll see a little diamond. Drag that down to add more sides:

Or drag it up to have fewer sides:

For today, just play around and draw something using these simple tools! Feel free to explore and play around. Figure out other tools if you’d like!

If you want to get to know more about Illustrator, you can click on the Help menu and go to Illustrator Help…

Click on Discover how Illustrator artwork is unique

There are many more tutorials that will help you to get to know the program. You can access those from the Help menu, then go into Tutorials…

If you’re looking for a good one to help you get started, click the link below:

Here’s a quick and easy project where you could take home a mouse pad with the design of your choice on it. Everyone will design one (for marks). You do not have to put your design on a mouse pad unless you want to and you meet a few simple conditions. Your design will only be put on a mouse pad if:

• your file is dropped off with the right name and it is the right size
• you have finished your earlier assignments and dropped them off correctly
• your parents have paid the $10 course fee
• you aren’t a pain in the neck

This same process could be used to apply a design to other items, which we can discuss.

The actual mouse pad is about 9.25 inches by 7.75 inches, but we make our design a little bigger so it covers the entire surface and there are no blank spots around the edge. Part of your design will be cut off on the finished product.

Set up your file: 9.5 inches by 8 inches, 300 pixels/inch, CMYK color

you can choose whether to create your design the wide way (Landscape):

Or the tall way (Portrait)

Once you have created the file, SAVE it in your OneDrive. As usual, make sure that OneDrive is running on your computer!

You can create the artwork yourself using whatever program you wish. As always, we want the quality of the artwork/photo to be as high as possible. If you want photos, I always recommend Unsplash, if you want icons, use The Noun Project, and if you want logos, visit Brands of the World. If you insist on using Internet images, make sure you know how to limit your Google search to Large images (REVIEW.)

Once you have created or found the images you want on your mouse pad, make sure you Place Embedded:

Depending on the image and the orientation of your canvas/background, you may need to resize the image. I’m using a tall image on a wide background, so I’ll need to resize it a bit:

Grab one of the corner handles and pull diagonally to resize. I need to make my image much smaller than my actual canvas/page:

You can add as much as you want to your design! Add other images, icons, or text, if you wish. Have fun and be creative!

Once you are done, you should, of course, save your Photoshop file, but you will not drop off the original file!

You need to drop off an image file that is not .psd. You can use .jpg or .png, but I prefer PNG. To create that image, go to File/Export/Export As…

You shouldn’t really have to change anything in the box that pops up. Yours should look like mine (with a different design, of course.)

Once you are done and have dropped off a .png, you could, if you wish, raise your hand and ask me to check that you have completed the conditions at the top of the page. If you meet those conditions and I have enough supplies available, I will print your image and show you how to apply it to the mouse pad.

Sometimes, especially when designing for someone else, your work doesn’t come out perfect the first time and it requires some revision in order to come up with a satisfactory final design.

We’ll practice this by reworking/redesigning the logos that you submitted previously.

You’ve been given the opportunity to comment on each other’s work. Sometimes this feedback is helpful and sometimes it isn’t. Sometimes it’s productive and sometimes it’s not. You might not agree with the things that people say about your work. They might not even like it. Your job as a designer is to consider the feedback and figure out what you could do to make your work better.

Your job is to take your original logo and make significant changes that will make it better. You will get marked on how much it changes for the better, so if all you do is correct a spelling mistake or something quick & easy, you won’t get a good mark.

You may love your original design and think that it’s great the way it is. You might be right about that, but you should also consider what it might look like with some revision.

You will submit a new, revised version of your logo as well as a reflection explaining how the feedback helped, what you changed, and what effect the changes had.

 

examples:

Initial designs:

Revisions:

 

 

This next assignment will show you how to outline an image in order to have it cut out as a sticker or a design that could be heat pressed onto a shirt or bag.

You will create a file in Illustrator that is 27″ wide and 6″ tall. You don’t necessarily have to use up all of that space.

Make sure you Save your file on your computer, in your OneDrive folder (oh, and take a moment to open the program called OneDrive…)

Choosing the right images for this project is very important. You need to find high quality images with a character or logo that is irregularly shaped (not a rectangle or something circular.)

You’ll probably want to find your images via Google Images. (please don’t use Bing. Bing is dumb.)

Google Images is great because there’s a Tools button:

When you click that button, you get some options that will make life much easier here.

Under Size, choose Large. This will limit your search to reasonably high quality images.

I would also recommend looking under Color and choosing Transparent:

You want to find characters and logos that do not have a background. Ideally, you will also find one image that is connected.

If I want a Star Wars logo, this one will not work well for this project because the letters are not connected so there is space between them:

one like this would work much better:

When you find an image you like, click on it. On the right side of the screen, you will see a larger version of the image. If you’ve chosen a Transparent background, you will see a checkerboard pattern around the image:

Right click on that larger image and choose Save Image As…

Save the image(s) wherever you like (Downloads is fine for now.)

In Illustrator, you need to add your image to your Artboard (page), by going to the File menu and choosing Place:

You can save yourself some trouble and skip a step below by turning OFF the “Link” button when you choose your file. If you do this, you do not need to worry about the important step below where you need to Embed your file:

Once you choose your image from your Downloads folder, or wherever you put it, you want to add it to your Artboard.

If you were to just click on the Artboard (white page), your image would probably pop up very large (assuming that you downloaded a high quality image)

It would be better to drag out a box on your page when placing the image:

If you are going to resize an image, make sure you hold down the SHIFT key on your keyboard and pull from the corner:

If you select your image on the Artboard, you can check the Properties panel to see how big the sticker would be. a 1 inch sticker would be quite tiny. 6 inches is pretty big.

EXTREMELY IMPORTANT: When you Place an image, you need to make sure you Embed. You can find that option on the bottom of the Properties panel under Quick Actions:

If you turned off the “Link” button when Placing your file, or if it is already Embedded, you will instead see a button that says Unembed (you don’t really ever want to do that…)

If you do not Embed your file, your sticker will not turn out well. The image will look terrible, if it shows up at all.

You can make sure you have Embedded your images on the Layers panel. Embedded images will be called Image. Unembedded files will be called “Linked File.”

You could also check the Links panel. If you see any links of chain, you know you have something that is not Embedded.

Open your Layers panel.

Your image(s) will likely be on Layer 1. You need to add another layer on top. You can do this at the bottom right of the panel with the + button:

Or with the top right Hamburger menu:

Using the Selection tool, Select your image(s) either by dragging a box around them on the Artboard, or you can click the blue squares next to the Image(s) on the layers panel.

Make a Copy, either with the Edit menu, then Copy, or by pressing Ctrl + C

On your Layers panel, select the new Layer 2. You may have to click off of the selected images first to deselect those.

Go to the Edit menu and choose Paste in Place to put a copy in exactly the same spot as the original image(s)

You should now see the Images on the new, top layer

Now take the original layer (Layer 1) and Lock it

I also like to turn that layer off so I can’t see it

Select ONE image at a time. When you have ONE image selected, you can get Illustrator to trace it and turn it into Paths.

With the image selected, you can go to the bottom of the Properties panel and click Image Trace

There are different types of tracing depending on the quality of the finished image. For our needs, we don’t need anything fancy, so I’ll click Black and White Logo, which is one of the simpler drawings:

You can also find this option under Object/Image Trace/Make:

if you’ve chosen that option, you should now see a black and white version of the image:

Once the Image is Traced, you need to Expand, in order to Convert the Tracing objects to paths. You can find this option on the Properties panel:

or in the Object menu:

Now you’ll see the red anchors that indicate that we now have a series of lines/Paths

You will notice that the Image has now turned into a Group:

Go on the Layers panel and expand that Group:

You need to get rid of the bottom layer, which will likely just be a rectangular box around the image. Scroll down to the bottom layer in the Group and select it:

Press Delete on your keyboard and that outside layer will disappear. You’ll see the Path Anchors going around the image:

Next, select the entire Group layer

Use the Pathfinder to Unite all of the paths into one shape

Unfortunately, my logo has a few stray lines and shapes that I need to get rid of. All I want is one outline around the entire logo.

With all of it selected, I need to Ungroup. You can do this on the Properties panel or the Object menu:

Now I have a series of separate paths:

Click on a blank  spot to Deselect

I’ll switch to the Direct Selection tool so I can get rid of some of those stray paths:

With that tool, I’ll draw a box around some of those extra paths to select them:

…then I’ll press Delete on my keyboard to get rid of those extra shapes:

I’ve got some more of those on the inside of my logo, so I’ll continue doing the same thing to get rid of those extra points:

Because I have so many of them, another way to do this would be to select and lock the big outline that I want to keep:

With that layer locked, I could Select all of the other extra points/paths and Delete those:

In the end, ideally, we will be left with ONE outline path:

I now have a big black shape that is blocking my image below.

I need to outline that shape with a very specific colour.

DOWNLOAD the file called Roland VersaWorks.ai

You will need to access the Swatches panel to load this special colour:

Click the three stripe hamburger menu at the top right of the Swatches panel

At the bottom of the pop up menu, choose Open Swatch Library, then Other Library

Find that file that you downloaded, which is probably in your Downloads folder:

That will open a new panel called Roland VersaWorks. We need the pink colour:

Drag that pink block into your Swatches panel in the first blank space:

In the Properties panel, you will see that you currently have a black Fill and no Stroke

Change the Fill to No Fill (white square with a red line through it)

And the Stroke colour should be that Cut Contour colour:

Change the Weight (thickness) of the Stroke to .25 pt

Your outline properties should look like this:

Now we have a pink outline that is going around the image.

Unfortunately, the cutter doesn’t cut very precisely, so cutting that close to a line is not a good idea. We will have to move that outline a bit so that there is some white space around the image.

Go to the Object menu, choose Path, then Offset Path…:

 

I like to move my path about 1/10th of an inch. Changing the Miter limit to Round looked better for my image. I want the smoothest possible outline.

 

This will create a second path that is 1/10th of an inch away from the first one. You need to get rid of the first one.

Select just the inside path (the one right on the outside of the image:

Delete that path!

You should be left with just one outline and it should leave some white space around the actual image:

 

Make sure you know how big your stickers are going to be! Think about what you are going to do with your stickers when they are done. Do you want them to be very small ( 1 inch?) or bigger (4 inches?). Resize your stickers as necessary. The bigger the stickers are, the harder they are to place without getting air bubbles underneath. If they’re small, you don’t want really fine lines that are going to be a mess to cut out. Talk to me about the size of your stickers.

 

Put your stickers as close together as possible on the sheet without touching! We don’t want to waste a lot of material if we can help it, so moving them together really helps.

 

If you aren’t going to use the whole 27″ width of the roll of sticker material, you may have to wait until I have other stickers to print for other people.

 

If you aren’t going to use the whole page, use the Artboard tool to resize the Artboard. Select the tool or press Shift + O

Drag the edges of the page in toward your designs in order to eliminate wasted space:

 

In the end, make sure that all of your Cut Contour outlines are on the very top layer

There’s one more important step that you need to follow. Select all of your outlines.

Go into the Object menu and choose Flatten Transparency…

In the box that pops up, change the Preset to High Resolution:

The rest is fine so just hit OK

Now it’s time to check your file and prepare for printing. Go to the File menu and choose Save As…

Change the file type to PDF

Hit Save

Now, check on the left hand side of the Save box for the word Summary. If it has an exclamation mark after it, there’s a PROBLEM

Click on it and you will see a warning at the bottom

This often means that the layer with the images also has transparency that needs to be flattened.

I like to lock my top, outlines layer before doing this

Then select the images layer

And again, Object/Flatten Transparency

MAKE SURE your outlines are still at the very top! If so, go through the Save As… step again. If the Summary now looks like this:

You’re good to save your .pdf file and hand it in for printing & cutting!