Artifacts when exporting business cards to PDFs

This has nothing to do with embedding or linking.

This is an artifact caused by Bicubic Downsampling in your PDF export settings (long story). Your design is pretty simple and your icons will compress nicely anyway so I suggest you turn OFF downsampling in your PDF export altogether. If you had more a more image heavy design, and needed downsampling to make it manageable, you can minimize/eliminate this effect by choosing Average Downsampling instead of Bicubic, but, like I said, you should be more than fine by turning it off.

Hi ​@Daniel_ABH,

Have you tried “Embed Image(s)” in the Links panel?

Also, because those logos are pngs, they’ll likely be an oversaturated black which isn’t recommended for print. It’s best to convert them into a CMYK file and make them 100% black (no other colours) as they are fairly small icons...before bringing them into Illustrator.

As ​@Bobby Henderson mentioned, recreating them as vector is best. Otherwise, I would suggest saving each icon (or all at once) as a CMYK tif file and then importing it into illustrator. Make sure to embed your links in the Illustrator file. Or, recreate your cards in Photoshop by copy + pasting the items from Illustrator into Photoshop. The suggestions in this paragraph should clear up the issue you’re having.

The problem probably has something to do with image compression and resolution settings in how the PDF is saved. If you choose lossless LZW compression or no compression at all that would eliminate lossy compression artifacts. Saving the PDF with the images preserved at their original resolution rather than being down-rezzed would make the icons sharper.

IMHO, the best approach for those kinds of icons is using vector-based versions of them. That would avoid any visual problems common to pixel-based images.