In this pin that I collaborated with Sharodactyl on, I have a little cat tail and it's a little bit further away from the cat's body and they had to use a little bit of recessed metal there. Something you want to look out for and something that a manufacturer might come back with is recessed metal. Okay, so you're in Illustrator, you got all your texts outlined, you've got your strokes expanded and it’s looking good. As long as you outline your strokes then there's no question about how big a stroke should be. If you put a one point stroke around everything and resize it, the stroke will get distorted. That turns the letters into shapes and then you’ll know for sure that your text will be perfect.Īnd you also want to do the same with your strokes. So, always remember to outline your text. So if you have any text, if you leave it just as text and send it to your manufacturer, they might not have that font and then it'll turn it into a default font and nobody wants that. My biggest tips with working with Adobe Illustrator and sending something to a manufacturer is that you need to outline and expand everything. But another super simple way to get a sketch onto your computer is take a picture of it with your phone and then email it to yourself. If you an app on your iPad, you can airdrop onto your computer. Okay, so you have a sketch and you want to get that sketch into Adobe Illustrator.

But what I'm talking about today is working with Adobe Illustrator. I have been using Adobe Illustrator for 15 years and I love it! There are a bajillion tutorials on YouTube, and SkillShare (get 2 months free here!) that walk you through how to use it and I'll probably put a few up here myself later specifically for pin stuff. It's a monthly payment and I highly recommend it. If you want to dive into Adobe Illustrator you can get Creative Cloud. Be sure to check with your manufacturer if they offer it and confirm any extra cost. Sometimes it's an extra cost, but occasionally they provide that service for free as a bonus for using them. If you don't have Illustrator and you prefer to use Photoshop, an app like Procreate that doesn't use vector files, or just sketch on paper, a lot of manufacturers can vector it for you. Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard for creating vector work, there are other vector programs out there that you can use. The file type that manufacturers want are vector files.

Let’s talk about files and how to set up your files for delivery to your manufacturer! What Types of Files do Manufacturers Need?

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