Vector work looks perfect on your canvas and awkward in a client inbox. Save your artboards as a single multipage PDF, upload it here, and Flipbooks AI publishes it as a flipbook that turns page by page in any browser. Each artboard becomes a page, in the order you arranged them, at the size you drew them. It is free to use, no watermark or ad lands on the artwork, and the number of artboards you publish is unlimited.
Open the Artboards panel and drag the artboards into reading order, one artboard per page. The panel order becomes the page order, so getting it right here saves rebuilding the PDF afterwards.
Use File then Save As, choose Adobe PDF and tick Use Artboards. Untick Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities to keep the file light, and pick a screen preset rather than a press one.
Upload the PDF, choose a page turn, add your logo and background, attach links to the artwork, then publish. Copy the link for a client, or take the embed code for your portfolio site.
Arrange your artboards in the Artboards panel so their order matches the reading order. Use File then Save As, choose Adobe PDF, and tick Use Artboards so every artboard becomes a page in one file. Upload that PDF here and the flipbook builds immediately. Pick a page turn, add your logo and background, attach links to the artwork, and set a password if the piece is confidential. Look at it on a phone, then publish and copy the link. The whole run takes a few minutes and none of it touches your original file.
An Illustrator to flipbook converter turns the artboards in your document into a booklet a reader can flip through in a browser. Illustrator does not publish one by itself, so the path runs through a PDF: save your artboards as a single multipage file, then upload it here. Flipbooks AI reads the pages, keeps every proportion and margin as you drew it, and adds the page turn on top. The reader never sees a download prompt or a file extension. They see your pages, bound in the order you set, and a corner that lifts under their thumb.
This is the part people get wrong first. A flipbook page is an artboard, so the document needs one artboard per page rather than everything spread across a single canvas. Rename them if it helps you keep track, and drag them into order in the Artboards panel, because the panel order is the page order in the export. If you have been working with pages side by side on one big artboard, split them first. Ten minutes of tidying there saves reordering a whole PDF later.
In the Save As dialog choose Adobe PDF, then tick Use Artboards and either leave it on All or type a range such as 1 to 24. In the PDF options, uncheck Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities: that option keeps a full copy of the AI file inside the PDF and can double or triple the size for no benefit to a reader. Pick a preset built for screen rather than press, and save. One file comes out, with your artboards as its pages.
Vector artwork is usually made to be looked at closely: a logo suite, a set of icons, a packaging range, a pattern library. Sent as an attachment it arrives as a file somebody has to decide what to do with, and most people decide later. A flipbook opens in one tap, holds the pages in sequence, and lets a reader zoom into the detail you spent the afternoon on. It also keeps the presentation in your hands rather than the default view of whichever viewer opens first on their machine.
Check File then Document Color Mode before you export. Work drawn for print sits in CMYK, and a screen renders in RGB, so a CMYK export can arrive with flatter greens and duller oranges than you approved. Switch the document to RGB for the screen version and adjust anything that shifts while it is still editable. Keep the CMYK document for the printer. Doing it in Illustrator means you decide how the color lands rather than leaving it to whichever browser opens the file.
Illustrator embeds most fonts in a PDF automatically, and embedded type stays crisp at any zoom. Two cases need care. If a font license blocks embedding, the export can substitute something else, so create outlines on a copy of the document before saving. If you outline everything by habit, remember the text stops being selectable and searchable in the PDF. Outline what you must, keep the rest live, and always open the finished PDF once to confirm the type looks the way you drew it.
Flipbooks AI gives a vector piece the frame it deserves. Set a cover so the flipbook opens on your title artboard. Put clickable areas over a logo variant so a reader jumps to the usage rules, or over a product so it opens the shop. Embed a short animation next to the static mark it came from. Add a table of contents for a long identity manual. Choose the turn effect and the background, drop in your own logo, and publish without a badge, a watermark or an advertisement anywhere near your pages.
Vector files are light until they are not. Gradient meshes, heavy transparency, drop shadows and blurs are rasterized on export, and the resolution used comes from Effect then Document Raster Effects Settings. If that is set to 300 for print, a page of soft shadows becomes a very large image inside your PDF. Set it to 150 for a screen version, simplify paths you duplicated fifty times, and the flipbook opens quickly even on a phone with two bars of signal.
The Marks and Bleeds panel in the PDF dialog is there for the printer, not the reader. Turn off trim marks, registration marks, color bars and page information for the screen version, and set the bleed to zero, or every page in your flipbook arrives with a thin border of crosses and swatches around the artwork. If the same document is going to print as well, save two PDFs from it. They take seconds and they are doing different jobs.
A brand guideline document, a packaging presentation, an icon set, a map series, a set of editorial illustrations, a pitch for a label range. They all live as artboards, they all export the same way, and they all become the same kind of flipbook. Six artboards or a hundred and sixty, the process does not change. Nothing has to be rebuilt in another program, and no part of the work is priced by the page.
The Photoshop route starts with a raster document and worries about resolution and pixel dimensions. Here the artwork is resolution independent until the moment you export, so the questions are different: artboard order rather than layer comps, font embedding rather than rasterizing smart objects, and raster effect settings rather than image downsampling. The upload step is identical for both. If your pages are photographs and composites, use the Photoshop guidance. If they are drawn, this one fits better.
Illustrators
Brand Studios
Packaging Designers
Agencies
Freelance Designers
Print Designers
A published page is flat, and the interactive layer sits above it. Put a link on a logo variant that jumps to the page explaining when to use it. Link a packaging mockup to the product listing. Link your studio name on the last page to your site, and an email address to a message window. In a long identity manual, a contents page with links to each section saves the reader scrolling through forty artboards to find the color palette.
Vector work is judged on edges, so it has to survive the phone it gets opened on. Flipbooks AI fits each page to the screen without cropping the artboard, and readers pinch to zoom right into a curve or a corner radius. On a narrow screen a spread can be read one page at a time, so a wide packaging layout does not shrink to nothing. There is nothing to install and no account to make, so the person you sent it to is reading within a second or two of tapping.
If the document is about a brand, the wrapper around it should not fight it. Set the background to a neutral that flatters the palette, choose an unobtrusive control style, and place your own logo, or the client logo, in the corner. Studios that publish a lot keep one set of defaults so every flipbook they send looks like part of a series. Several languages are supported for the interface, which matters when a guideline document goes to more than one office.
Presenting three routes is easier when each route is its own flipbook with its own link. Nobody scrolls past the concept they were meant to see first, and you can watch which link gets opened again after the meeting. Password protect the ones that are still speculative, turn off downloading so an unapproved mark does not escape into a deck somewhere, and republish the moment a revision lands.
A brand document with a stray badge from some publishing tool in the corner undermines the work inside it. Flipbooks AI is completely free and adds nothing to your pages: no watermark, no advertising, no upgrade banner over the cover. Unlimited flipbooks, unlimited pages, and the whole feature set, including your own branding, password protection and analytics, at no cost. That is what makes it reasonable to publish a speculative piece or a personal project as carefully as a paid one.
Vector pages with heavy effects can be slow to arrive, so each page is compressed for delivery while your original stays untouched. The opening pages appear first and the rest load quietly behind them, which is why a long guideline document feels about as quick as a short one. Combine that with a sensible raster effects setting and a reader on a phone gets your cover almost instantly rather than a loading spinner.
We deliver brand guidelines as a fifty artboard document, and clients used to lose the PDF inside a shared drive within a fortnight. Now they get a link that opens on a phone, with a contents page that jumps straight to the logo rules. The questions we get have changed from where is the file to sensible ones about the palette.
Product catalogs
My packaging concepts are drawn in Illustrator and used to go out as attachments that arrived compressed and dull. Switching the document to RGB before saving fixed the color, and publishing each route as its own flipbook meant the client stopped seeing all three at once and comparing them badly.
Client lookbooks
The tip about unticking Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities cut my export from ninety megabytes to something that opens instantly on a phone. I had been sending that bloated file to clients for years without knowing why it was so heavy.
Newsletters and programmes
I illustrate picture books and I needed a way to show a full dummy without posting art online for anyone to grab. A password protected flipbook with downloads switched off does exactly that, and publishers can read the whole thing on a tablet in the order I intended.
Portfolio flipbooks
Not every artboard is ready for the world. A pitch that has not been presented, a rebrand under embargo, a label design for a product with no launch date. A password keeps the flipbook to the people you gave it to, downloads can be switched off, and nothing is listed publicly, so the link is the only route in. When the embargo lifts you remove the password and the same link works for everybody.
Publishing gives you one link, and the link is the whole distribution plan. Paste it into an email, a client thread or a proposal. Embed the flipbook in your portfolio site so the work reads in place instead of downloading. Print a QR code on a business card or a leave behind so somebody at a meeting can open the deck on their own phone. Add a password when the piece is confidential. Readers need no account, no plugin and no particular device.
You keep drawing in Illustrator. If the document gets laid out in InDesign afterwards, export from there instead. If a colleague builds pages in Affinity Designer, Figma or Canva, those export a PDF too and the upload does not know the difference. The embed code drops into a portfolio site, a Squarespace page or a client intranet. Nothing here replaces a step in your process, it only handles the last one.
| Application | Rating | Unlimited Credits | Usage Rating | Description |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10/10 | Yes | 1 | Flipbooks AI publishes the multipage PDF you save from Illustrator as a flipbook with real page turns, clickable areas over your artwork, embedded video, your own logo and reader analytics. Unlimited pages and flipbooks, nothing stamped on the artwork, nothing to pay. | |
Adobe Illustrator | 5.2/10 | No | 2 | Illustrator is the drawing tool, and for precise vector work there is nothing better. Publishing is outside its job description. It writes a PDF and hands it over, and the person you send that PDF to still gets a file rather than a document they can read in place. |
Adobe InDesign | 7.1/10 | No | 3 | For a forty page guideline document, InDesign handles pagination, running heads and text flow far better than an artboard pile. It still stops at the PDF, though, and a reader opening that PDF gets a scrolling viewer with no cover, no turn and no way for you to tell it was read. |
Affinity Designer | 8.3/10 | No | 4 | Affinity Designer is a capable vector editor with a one off price that suits freelancers, and its artboard export works much like Illustrator. It shares the same gap at the end: the output is a file to send, not a page to open, so distribution is still your problem. |
Issuu | 6.4/10 | No | 5 | Issuu suits publications looking for a public shelf to sit on, and readers know the interface. The free tier surrounds your pages with Issuu identity and limits uploads, which is a poor fit for an identity document where the whole point is that nothing competes with the brand. |
Flipsnack | 7.8/10 | No | 6 | Flipsnack combines a flipbook reader with an in browser page editor and some commerce features, which helps if you want to build catalog pages without a design tool. Free accounts are restricted and the branding removal, analytics and longer documents belong to paid plans. |
Heyzine | 6.9/10 | No | 7 | Heyzine is quick and its turn animations look good, so a first flipbook takes very little effort. The free tier keeps a badge on the reader and limits how many flipbooks you can hold, so a studio publishing regularly ends up on a subscription to keep the frame clean. |
Canva | 8.1/10 | No | 8 | Canva is a fast way to assemble pages when the design does not need drawing tools, and plenty of teams already work in it. Its viewing options stay simple next to a dedicated flipbook, without realistic turns or the reading analytics a designer would use to judge a pitch. |
Marq | 6.5/10 | No | 9 | Marq, once Lucidpress, is built around locked brand templates so non designers can produce on brand material without breaking the layout. It is a governance tool more than a presentation one, and full use of it needs a paid business plan. |
PDF on a File Host | 7.6/10 | No | 10 | Uploading the PDF to a file host and sharing the link is quick and costs nothing. The reader gets a download or a generic viewer, your cover becomes a filename, and if the artwork changes you either overwrite carefully or send a second link that competes with the first. |
Old Illustrator documents pile up quietly, and the good ones stop being visible about a month after delivery. Exporting them one by one and publishing each as a flipbook turns that pile into something linkable: a case study you can send in a proposal, a set of pieces grouped by industry, a personal project that finally has somewhere to live. There is no cost per publication, so the only limit is how many you feel like exporting.
Once the piece is live you can see how it performed: how many people opened it, how far through they read, and which pages held them longest. For a portfolio that tells you which projects to lead with. For a client presentation it tells you whether the appendix was ever reached, which changes how you run the follow up call. Each flipbook keeps its own figures, so two versions of the same pitch can be compared directly.
An AI file needs Illustrator, a version recent enough to read it, and the fonts you used. A flipbook needs a browser. That difference matters more than it sounds, because the people you most want to reach are the ones without your software. Pages published today keep opening on tomorrow devices, updates arrive without you doing anything, and there is no file to migrate when your machine changes hands.
No. An AI file carries live paths, effects and font links that a browser cannot render, so save your artboards as a multipage PDF and upload that instead. The saved PDF is what the reader sees, which also means you get to check it before anybody else does.
Use File then Save As and choose Adobe PDF. In the dialog, tick Use Artboards and leave it set to All, or type a range. Illustrator writes one PDF with each artboard as a page, in the order they appear in the Artboards panel, which is the file the upload needs.
Use RGB for a flipbook. Screens render in RGB, and a CMYK export can arrive with duller colors than you approved. Switch the document color mode in Illustrator, check anything saturated, then export. Keep your CMYK document for print rather than converting back and forth.
Usually not, since Illustrator embeds fonts in the PDF and embedded type stays sharp at any zoom. Outline it on a copy of the document when a font license prevents embedding, or when a collaborator has reported substituted type. Outlined text is no longer selectable, so outline only what you must.
Two settings are usually responsible. Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities stores a full copy of the AI file inside the PDF, so untick it. And Document Raster Effects Settings left at 300 pixels per inch turns every shadow and blur into a large image. Set it to 150 for a screen version.
Yes, completely. There is no charge, no watermark on your artwork, no ads and no page limit. Branding, clickable areas, embedded media, password protection and analytics are all part of the free tool, whether you publish one piece or fifty this year.
Yes. Draw the clickable area over any part of a published page and point it at a website, an email address, another page in the flipbook, or a video. The artwork underneath is untouched, so the layout you drew in Illustrator stays exactly where you put it.
The steps that matter differ. In Illustrator you manage artboard order, font embedding and raster effect settings. In Photoshop you manage layer comps, color profiles and export resolution. Both finish with one PDF, and from the upload onwards the two are identical.
If you still have questions or want to explore more details about our features, limitations, and usage, we invite you to visit our full FAQ page.
