Gone are the days when illustrating meant sitting down to a blank piece of paper with a pencil. The capabilities of illustrating have advanced at an incredible rate, and that means that the technology has, too. Illustrating and design have become a combination of artistic quality and computer savvy. Several programs have become crucial tools in industries that center around design, from publishing to the internet. Of course, Adobe Illustrator is a program that experienced designers and illustrators can work with, or that novices can learn and use to handle design on their own instead of having to outsource the task for a website or marketing materials. Steven Patterson, owner of The ACTS Learning Center in Florence, Kentucky, explains the benefits of learning Adobe Illustrator.
Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop complement each other. A designer or illustrator would most likely work with a combination of the two. While Photoshop works with photographs and photorealistic images and their manipulation, Illustrator works more with what you think of when you think of graphic design: You can actually create graphics, logos, and typesetting. The program is often used for designing headers for websites, magazines, brochures, newspapers, newsletters, and signs. You are actually creating the image from Illustrator’s wide selection of tools (colors, patterns, fonts, etc.) and then manipulating it, and transferring it to the format of what it will be used for. Because one will often use both Photoshop and Illustrator to create an entire design, Illustrator has been upgraded to have the same user interface as Photoshop. So the tools and commands are easily recognizable, and familiarity with one program translates to familiarity with the other.
Illustrator has also been upgraded to support web publishing, making it most efficient and useful in an area it is arguably used most often. Now designers – or anyone who learns Illustrator – can work directly with the program and the web, to design graphics for a web page and publish them from that point. This lack of need for other software or skill to get from point A (Illustrator) to point B (the internet) is making the program more accessible for those who are not designers by trade, but who are looking to design the layout for their company website, newsletter, or brochure.
Illustrator’s capabilities keep up with those of Photoshop. The newer versions of Illustrator do allow 3-D images to be created, which meshes well with Photoshop since now 3-D images created on both can be used in the same project. Illustrator has also offered the feature Live Paint, which performs the conversion of bitmap imagery into vector art, allowing more flexibility in adding color to the image. The latest version, CS4, also allows you to create different versions of the same image in the same document by implementing different “art boards” on your one screen. This handy feature allows you to compare your versions and make firm decisions about the graphic and how it should look. There are also tools now that can make images look more realistically painted, instead of computerized looking.
Illustrator has been released in different versions that cater to different languages regions of the world. It has become the most turned-to tool for design and illustration, especially thanks to the successful relationship of Illustrator and Photoshop. The program is necessary for anyone going into design or illustration, in any industry, to learn. However, it is also wise to learn Illustrator even if your career follows a different path, say you own your own business, or work for a smaller company. Illustrator helps you handle things you never thought you could do on your own, so the power to market successfully is in your own hands – something that will save you a lot of time and money while bringing in new business.
