Issue link: http://read.uberflip.com/i/707472
S I G N & D I G I T A L G R A P H I C S • August 2016 • 85 I can't stress the importance of being organized in your file naming and sav- ing of these fasteners. Regardless of how deep you want to get with the hundreds of types of fasteners on the market today, you must be able to quickly find the fas- tener and import it into your drawing. You may want to create bolts with specific thread counts, and/or in metric sizes with very specific specifications. If you don't have a place to store them, you will lose them, bury them, misplace them, delete them or bitmap them by accident. I have done this too many times. Please, take the time to develop a way to save these with a file saving protocol that will make sense now, and later on down the road. Step 5 – Bitmap, bitmap, bitmap… Always bitmap Unless you like giving away all of your hard work for the competition to steal, make sure you bitmap your sign design work prior to making your final presen- tation PDF for the client. It's easy and fast, saves file size and protects all of your work from thievery. I create a "Save As" Figure 4 Figure 5 file with JPG as the last three letters in the file name. By selecting just the fas- tener, I create a high resolution 600 dpi+ bitmap, separate from the background or sign image that sometimes look better on screen than the native CDR or PDF version. Take the time to build your own set of fasteners. It took me less than an hour to build every type of fastener I use on a daily basis. Best of luck! You may download a free P D F of these nuts and bolts for your own use, especially in CorelDRAW (version 14 or newer). Simply go to my website www. charboneausigns.com/#!drawings/cmim and click on the F R E E FA S T E N E R S P D F icon. It will open the PDF viewer on your computer or device, and allow you to save it to your desktop, or email it to your- self. Remember, there are no outlines on these, so it's easy to enlarge or reduce them to fit the scale and size you need. I hope you find the document use- ful in building your library of fasten- ers. I welcome your feedback at Matt@ CharboneauSigns.com. SDG Figure 6 I can't stress the importance of being organized in your file naming and saving of these fasteners.