How to Self-Check Your Designs with Illustrator October 6

Upload with the assurance you’ve got it right.

I’ve put together this video tutorial of a process you can use to self-check your design files before uploading them using Illustrator – as well as covering all the common mistakes to look out for.

This is ideal if your design file won’t upload to Ponoko, or you want to be sure you’ve formatted everything correctly before getting us to make it…

Posted in Josh Judkins, Laser Cutting Tutorial by Josh Judkins | Comments are off for this post

Related posts:

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    How to combine shapes in Illustrator for laser cutting with Ponoko
  3. Tutorial: using repeat patterns for laser etching
  4. Creating Great Laser-Cut Designs

8 Responses to “How to Self-Check Your Designs with Illustrator”

  1. sue Says:
    October 6th, 2009 at 8:58 pm

    AWESOME!!!!

  2. IC Says:
    October 6th, 2009 at 10:57 pm

    video is great, but here are my 2cents: assign shortcuts to repetitive actions, like Select Same Fill & Stroke. Also I would make a copy of the final file & then go thru the checking in that copy. To check if there is no open fonts left (which is very important in fact) you can use Type > Find Font..

  3. Josh Judkins Says:
    October 6th, 2009 at 11:19 pm

    Thanks for the feedback! I’ll make some adjustments and do a revised version once the methodology is tighened up furhter.

  4. maree Says:
    October 7th, 2009 at 12:50 pm

    Excellent…comprehensive…when’s is the directors cut coming out

  5. Josh Judkins Says:
    October 7th, 2009 at 3:29 pm

    Thanks Maree! I’d considered a Director’s Cut, but believe me – all the deleted scenes were done so for a reason. Could potentially do a bloopers reel…

  6. Terry Says:
    October 9th, 2009 at 3:12 am

    How do you specify what side you would like the laser cutter to cut on?

    Apparently I didn’t realize that bamboo is raw on one side and finished on the other? The laser cutter cut my design on the raw side, resulting in the finished (nice) side being the opposite of my design.

    Should I submit by design backwards, or is there a way to specify? Or it is just all random when it comes to side chosen to cut on?

  7. Josh Judkins Says:
    October 9th, 2009 at 2:10 pm

    Hi Terry! If you could take a couple of photos and email service AT ponoko DOT com with this inquiry, we can follow it up with you via email. Thanks!

  8. Tim Curtin Says:
    August 2nd, 2010 at 10:21 am

    Such a useful video! And great comment IC: I’d never seen that command, but so very useful! (I had a few designs with unfound fonts – now I’ve been able to track them down.)