Exporting your UI for App design using Illustrator CC 2017
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
This video is going to be more about exporting for apps but let's pretend we're not building a desktop and tablet version, we're just building a mobile app, so we've kind of build some icons to be used in here. It's very easy.
Let's say I want to export these two guys together, maybe separately, so I'm going to ungroup them. You go in, the Kiwi. Actually, we'll just use the Kiwi at the moment. You could drag all of these in one go, let’s get rid of this guy, this guy's going to be called the Kiwi. What they're going to need is-- Let's get rid of all of these. All you need to do is, there’s iOS, and Android. You're probably developing for both, or maybe just for iOS, or just for Android, but let's say we're doing it for an Apple product, and we're working with the Apple developer, and he needs iOS graphics, click on 'iOS', and what they do is, they need to scale it 1, 2, and 3, so this size, double size, and three times the size to work with all the different sizes that they have got in terms of their screens.
They're very strict on the naming convention, so we're going to leave the suffix in there, then we're going to click 'Export'. I’m going to export it to this one here, and we should find Kiwi in here. Here he is there.
So we've got the three versions that they're going to need, there's the standard PNG, which is the '1' size, then there's-- There's a PNG here at '1' scale, then, at times 2, '2x', then, at times 3, '3x'. And those are the kinds of files that they're going to need, so every graphic that you make you're going to need four versions. They're probably going to use these three, but give them the SVG as well. And if you're going to do the same stuff for Android, it's very similar, get rid of these guys, click on 'Android', they just have a different naming convention, and they have lots of different sizes for their apps. You can see, there's even a smaller, low dpi, medium dpi, high dpi, extra-large high, goes right up to xxx high dpi. So there's up to four scales; some of the LG phones have some huge, big retina screens.
Click 'Export', same thing, we're going to hit 'Kiwi'. Oh, there's already a Kiwi SVG, that’s okay, but you'll be giving them these versions. These are the versions that would go for Android. So you might be doing both, or you might be doing just one or the other, but that's what they're going to expect. Every graphics is going to have all this, and it’s going to have this explicit naming convention here.
I know that Android I think works slightly differently, and they end up in different folders, so that's something you might have to talk to your developer about having one of them. Probably you can just give them this way and they’ll split them into the folders that they need to go into.
So that's exporting for app development, and the one thing to think of, like we did in the previous tutorial, is looking at Pixel Perfect, especially if you've got any of those kind of a horizontal and vertical lines, mainly because we're using these PNGs, these pixel versions.
All right, that's it for that video, see you in the next one.