I’m a photographer, so that means I mainly focus on photography related things and skills. Well, occasionally there will be other things that I have to do with my business that involves me having other skills. Sometimes I do really well and other times not so much. Recently I was needing to print a banner for a bridal show, and I ran into a few problems. If I had known some things, my life would have been a lot easier, so today I’m talking about using Adobe Illustrator for Logos and large prints.
Using Adobe Illustrator for Logos and Large Prints
I think I’ve been using my current logo for around 3 years now. I might be completely off on that, but it’s been a while. When I originally designed it, I used Photoshop because I’m a photographer and that’s what I know. Things worked out pretty well and I made a PNG file for the logo, so it had a blank background that could be used on anything. I thought that was pretty nifty that I figured out how to do that. The logo was around 300k which was fine for websites and business cards, but that’s about as big as I made it.
So about a week ago, I start looking into making this banner, and I’m looking at a 5 foot by 1 foot banner, pretty big. All my files though are pretty puny and just made for the web. It was at that point that I realized I didn’t save a Photoshop version, so I really had no idea what I had done with the original. I just had that PNG file, which doesn’t tell me font or any of the other specifics I would need to create a larger logo.
After this I decided to get smart with my logo. I decided to start using Adobe Illustrator. The big different between Illustrator and Photostop as far as files go, is that Illustrator creates vector files, which means they can be adjusted in size and won’t get ugly. I went ahead and remade my logo in Illustrator with the best match I could. I made a 5 x 1 page, so when I exported the file, it was now 5 mb.
I got my sign in a few days ago, and it looks great. I can only imagine how distorted it would have been if I had used my first file. I recently made a logo for my film website, so both are in Adobe format. Now I’m Using Adobe Illustrator for Logos and Large Prints and it should allow me to make all types of changes in the future and make my life easier.
