Anyone know why my art has become flattened and there is now a big blue 'X' on it?

[linsey_0216]

No idea how this happened but I closed my file as usual then when I re-opened it all of the artwork is flat and has a big blue 'X' on it, all one piece. Any help here would e greatly appreciated!

[Ton Frederiks]

The big blue X shows that it is an image (look in the Links panel).

Don't open a PDF in Illustrator (unless it was saved with Illustrator capabilities option).

Use the original Illustrator .ai file to edit the content.

[Monika Gause]

What did you do? Open a multipage PDF?

If that is the case you could try if embedding all the pages helps. But still you won't have a lot of joy editing it.

Did you save the file on a server?

Did Illustrator crash?

And what Ton wrote.