Let’s say you’re making a web banner ad in Illustrator. There’s a lot of small text (it’s an informative ad).
After much tweaking, everything looks amazing — legible even! You go to ‘Save for Web & Devices…’… and your carefully kerned text turns light and fuzzy and unreadable. You try sliding up the jpg quality, adding gif colors, and rubbing your eyes. But the type still looks off.
This is because Ai is rasterizing the text with its default anti-alias settings. You can change these settings to improve the appearance of type. Go to Effects > Rasterize, and you will be given three options for anti-aliasing in a drop-down menu: None, Art Optimized (Supersampling), and Type Optimized (Hinted).
Here’s how the different settings look at 100%:
200%:
After setting the effect, you can change the object’s anti-alias settings in the Appearance panel. (If you are the decisive sort, you can permanently rasterize the object by going to Object > Rasterize.)
And now your banner ads will be readable & beautiful again! Those people with ad blockers are truly missing out!
Notes
- Adobe help page: “Set anti-aliasing options for type“
- Sometimes non-text objects also need their anti-aliasing settings tweaked. Here is an example from Real World Illustrator: “To anti-alias or not to anti-alias? That is the (blurry) question…”.
I have noticed that anti aliasing is a problem when converting to paths in other Adobe platforms. Clients want to be able to print on DVD labels, or set their CD/DVD printers in order to get the right clarity on text.
I have personally had clients ask be about the issue of Anti aliasing. This has cause some issues in the CD / DVD industry. Clients don’t want their artwork text to be pixelated, yet they don’t know about aliasing options.
I don’t quite understand – are your clients sending files with the text converted to outlines? & they print poorly?