custom picture symbol look horrid even at super high resolution!

[JacquelinePursell]

I custom made a symbol in Adobe Illustrator and have exported it to BMP, PNG, and JPG and even at killer resolutions and 200MB the quality of the symbol is terrible and pixelated.  I even increased my Illustrator drawing to a very large size and tried that but it's not doing anything but make my drawing speed slow.  I found a property under Appearance for quality and this helped but it's still not crystal clear like the ESRI symbols.  

2 questions:

Does Appearance quality setting effect the symbol on the actual print?  What does it really do when I use Draft quality on the final product?

How do I get a stunning custom symbol? the resolution issue is killing my map!

[RobertBorchert]

The issue us your picture symbol is to large and complicated.  When the system converts your picture to a symbol it can only handle so much and discards the rest. You need to us pictures that you have scaled down to very small size.  Something like 100 x 100 pixels or less would be best.

If it displayed your pictures symbols at full quality and resolution your screen refresh rate would quickly drop very low with more and more symbols.

[RobertBorchert]

Additionally Pro is designed to build for Online mapping. Large picture symbols don't work very well online.  You need to go small and streamlined.

[JacquelinePursell]

it's a very simple vector drawing.....  I tried very tiny and medium and large and all formats and nothing is working right 

[RobertBorchert]

Oh, I read 200mb. 

My apologies you wrote picture symbol.  Pictures are Rasters.

What is the symbol representing? I think you would be better off not using a picture symbol.

There are thousands of symbols available via the ESRI Font set. 

If you have to us that particular Vector Symbol you should get a Font Creator and create a font from your symbol. True Type.  However, the drawback to this would be that the font would need to be installed on every computer that uses that GIS

[JacquelinePursell]

there are no appropriate symbols for this map.  It's for a new park and we have river access points that they want a person in a small boat and not the boat launch or a sailboat or a freighter.....  

[RobertBorchert]

Take a look at Font ESRI Environmental and Icons

ASCII code 238

It is a fishing boat with an outboard.  No person in it though 

[RobertBorchert]

ESRI US Forestry has a canoe with two people in it

ascii 215

[JacquelinePursell]

I should be able to create my symbols though....  ESRI can't have a symbol from everything out there.  I'd really like to use mine because it's cute and I'm proud of my work.

[DanPatterson_Retired]

lets get back to the size... in raster format (ie png for instance) how many rows and columns is it?

I suspect it looks horrid since it is trying to downsample to a coarser resolution.