The place I work got Adobe CS5 a couple months ago, so I was called upon to recite the magic words, “Art Degree powers, ACTIVATE!” and get to work making little vector bears and geese and fishies that we can all use on our powerpoints and t-shirts.
I’ve now finished up several illustrations, but I’m not really sure how to use them-- when I’m in AI, I can enjoy the infinite scalability, but I can’t paste the file into, say, powerpoint. I can save it as a EU file or something, but when I import it into powerpoint it’s all pixellated and the colors are off, even though I made it in RGB.
Are my suspicions correct and there is no file type you can save it as that retains its scalability? Do you just have to go into Illustrator and expand it out as big as you want it and save it as a .jpeg or something each time?
Also, if anyone wants to recommend a good tutorial or community site, that would be appreciated.
Don’t cut and paste it at all – place it in Powerpoint using the “Insert Photo->Picture From File” option. Cut-and-paste basically pixelates it.
Modern versions of PowerPoint can place .ai (Illustrator) files directly; with full scalability. The color shifts you see are probably the color matching system: set the profile on the illustrator file to “sRGB” or “Microsoft RGB”.
If you run into an app that can’t use .ai files natively, export your Illustrator file as Encapsulated PostScript - .eps. Most programs will nag you to import it at a certain size, but it will retain the pretty vectory-ness.