Here are some tips for people who are selling vector illustrations.

You never know who will buy your illustrations and how they will use them. The ideal situation would be that all customers had the program Illustrator, but this is not true. Maybe they use the programs Freehand, Inkscape or Coreldraw.

Maybe they don’t have a vector program at all and use Photoshop or Paint Shop Pro. Or maybe they want to use your image in Flash. You want to be sure that your images can be opened and edited in the most programs. The less hassle the customer has to go through to use your illustrations, the more they will buy from you!

Tip 1:
If you save your vector image as a JPG file, you are 100% sure that every program can open your file.  You can also be sure that they can’t edit your image anymore, and that's -not- a good thing. Most of the time they want to edit your image so it fits with the whole design (for example change the haircolor of a person, or remove the background).

So the best way to save your file is an EPS file, version 8. EPS can be opened by all vector programs, and most non-vector programs. (illustrator, freehand, coreldraw, photoshop, flash, etc.) Not everyone will have the newest version of a program, so with version 8 you are sure people with older versions can open it too.

The only people who can’t open your file is people who only have the program Word. This is very rare tough, especially for people who are paying for illustrations. But these people can download the free program Inkscape here:

http://www.inkscape.org/download/?lang=en.

All they have to do is download the program, open your EPS file, and then “save as JPG” and they are done. (if you ever get an private message/email from a customer who can’t open your file, you can tell them about this option).

Here is how you save your file as a .EPS version 8 in Illustrator: (freehand, Inkscape and coreldraw can save as an EPS too)

File -> save as -> eps -> version 8.

Tip 2:

Close all your filled paths.

Printers don’t always understand open paths. They might refuse to print it, or print it wrong.

Printing out a JPG never gives problems, but a lot of quality will be lost. So most people will print them as a .EPS.

Closed paths are also more predictable when a customer wants to edit your image.

These two shapes look the same in “preview mode”:

But with “view -> outline”, you see the difference. The one below is the right way to draw your shapes.

Tip 3:

Remove stray points. Stray point are anchor points that you made but that are not necessary for the illustration. If you click with your pen tool somewhere you create an anchor point, but if you do nothing with it, it will not be seen in preview mode, but it is still there!

You have to remove them so it’s easier to understand for the customer which anchor points are attached to which part of your image. It also just looks messy.

How to find stray points when you can’t see them?

If you go to view -> outline , the stray points will look like this:

Just select them with the selection tool (black arrow) and press delete. Be careful though! There is also a little x in the eye of the horse, this is NOT a stray point. This x is part of the circle in the eye. If you remove it,you will remove the whole circle.

There is an easier way to remove stray points.

You have to download a free plugin, you can find it here: http://rj-graffix.com/software/plugins.html#SelectMenu

It’s only for Adobe Illustrator. After you install it, it will show up as an extra menu in Illustrator.

You can go to: select -> object -> stray points. It will select all stray points, you can click “delete” and you are done!

Tip 4:

Be careful with meshes, blends, gradients and transparencies.

Adobe Illustrator has the option “meshes”. This maybe looks very cool, but no other program can open it. So do not use these at all. You can try to use blends instead.

Blends, gradients and transparencies are OK, but can give different results when opened in other programs. To make sure this doesn't happen, expand them.

You can do this by selecting all blends, gradients and transparencies with the selection tool (black arrow) and go to: object -> expand. This way they can't edit your blends, gradients or transparencies anymore, but at least they can open it.

Tip 5:

Give your layers names and make sure the layers make sense.

For example make the background on 1 layer, so if they want to remove it, they only have to remove 1 layer. If you give your layers names, the customer sees directly which layer he has to remove or edit.

Example:

Good luck!
Feel free to ask any questions about this tutorial.

Greetings, Nancy
(illustrator, designer)