Hi! First of all, Congratulations on starting your own business. I wish you much success. I think we can save you some time on saving your files because saving a pdf is easy! Open your Illustrator Artwork and choose, "Save As" and in the drop down menu at the bottom of the dialog box, choose Adobe PDF (pdf). (PDF is a natural file format for Illustrator files. ) When the dialog box opens, you want to uncheck "Preserve Illustrator Editing." (See photo below) And, I alsouncheck the bottom option -- Create Acrobat Layers from Tp-Level Layers. By turning off both of these, it gives you a little more protection from people manipulating your files. You can open a pdf directly into Illustrator and work with it just like an Illustrator file, but by turning these off, it gives it more protection. You can choose some of the other options on the left, like compression, or Marks and Bleeds to customize your output. If your files are smaller than 8.5 X 11, (like 5 x 7) you can use marks and bleeds to give the customer crop marks so they can cut the art to fit their frame size. Now here is a personal preference, I ike opening my pdfs in photoshop because I can control the resoltion on import and I feel that Photoshop does a better job of creating a jpg than Illustrator. (Again, it's my personal preference--I am sure there are others who would say that the export function in Illustrator works great--I just like what I see better when I do this.) Once you have your pdfs created, inside Photoshop, select Open and select your pdf. In the dialog box that comes up (see below) Click on thee page you want to use (if there is more than one you have to click on it) and make sure that Crop is set to Trim size and the the resolution is set to 300, and click ok. If you don't set the crop to trim size, then the PDF will default to Art box, and you will lose your page dimensions. Once you open it in Photoshop, then all you have to do is choose your jpg settings and you are good to go! I would recommend that you learn how to create an action in Photoshop to save these as a jpg--then all you need to do is run your action to automate the jpg saving process which will save you time. If you have any other questions, let us know. Have fun creating! Michelle
... View more