What is Adobe Illustrator?
Lesson 2 from: Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud: Essentials for Creating ProjectsBrian Wood
What is Adobe Illustrator?
Lesson 2 from: Adobe Illustrator Creative Cloud: Essentials for Creating ProjectsBrian Wood
Lessons
Class Introduction
01:23 2What is Adobe Illustrator?
06:24 3Explore the Interface
11:45 4Create and Save New Documents
07:03 5Zoom and Navigate
07:23 6Working with Artboards
18:11 7Introduction to Layers
18:53 8Rulers and Guides
09:05Shapes and Drawing
45:27 10Aligning and Combining Shapes
15:31 11Pen Tool
30:59 12Manipulating Stroke and Fill
14:39 13Creating and Editing with Color
17:36 14Painting with Gradients
10:36 15Getting Started with Patterns
08:11 16Adding Text To Your Document
08:43 17Formatting Text
11:35 18Strokes and Variable Strokes in Adobe Illustrator
16:55 19Rotating Objects in Adobe Illustrator
08:42 20Effects and the Appearance Panel in Adobe Illustrator
10:58 21Adding Photo Images in Adobe Illustrator
12:43 22Working with Linked Content in Adobe Illustrator
10:14 23Packaging your Project for Handoff in Adobe Illustrator
04:28 24Best Formats to Save Your Files
14:35 25Select Like a Pro: Layers, Groups, & Other Unique Tools
33:57 26Edit Paths Like a Pro in Adobe Illustrator
08:41 27Editing Paths: Pen Tool in Adobe Illustrator
03:31 28Creating & Applying Brushes to Artwork in Adobe Illustrator
18:21 29Editing Paths: Knife & Scissor Tool in Adobe Illustrator
03:09 30Editing Paths: Join Tool in Adobe Illustrator
10:46 31Editing Paths: Isolation Mode in Adobe® Illustrator®
02:11 32Pen Tool Shortcuts in Adobe Illustrator
16:44 33Other Drawing Tools & Methods in Adobe Illustrator
07:05 34Transforming Techniques in Adobe Illustrator
05:35 35Shortcut to Reflecting Artwork in Adobe Illustrator
02:19 36Get to Know Your Appearance Panel in Adobe Illustrator
17:42 37Exploring Effects in Adobe Illustrator
10:01 38Work Smarter with Graphic Styles in Adobe Illustrator
04:50 39Color Inspiration in Adobe Illustrator
09:34 40Type Effects in Adobe Illustrator
11:18 41Masking Your Artwork in Adobe Illustrator
13:40 42Using Creative® Cloud® Libraries in Adobe® Illustrator®
15:47 43Capture Artwork with Creative Cloud Apps & Adobe Illustrator
12:21 44Tracing Raster Images in Adobe Illustrator
13:40 45Blending Artwork in Adobe Illustrator
12:47 46Using Symbols in Adobe Illustrator
10:47 47Using a Perspective Grid in Adobe Illustrator
09:05 48Crash Recovery in Adobe Illustrator
08:45 49GPU Performance in Adobe Illustrator
03:51 50Curvature Tool in Adobe Illustrator
06:49 51App Integration in Adobe Illustrator
11:52 52Creative Cloud Libraries in Adobe Illustrator App
04:42 53Shaper Tool in Adobe Illustrator
06:06 54Smart Guides in Adobe Illustrator
01:31 55Text Enhancements in Adobe Illustrator
02:11 56SVG Export in Adobe Illustrator
06:50Lesson Info
What is Adobe Illustrator?
How's everybody doing? Great. Great, all right. So, like Jim said today is all about beginners, today is just about getting started, getting warmed up, kind of getting used to Illustrator. I'm not gonna kill you about it, we're not gonna go crazy, but we've got a lot of ground to cover today, so, what I really wanna do is I wanna talk for a few seconds here about things like who is the class for. Illustrator is for anybody that needs to create general artwork. Vector based artwork. I know a lot of people who do marketing, print designers, web, I actually do web, I do web design, web developing. UI, UX, people that do production, just about anybody that needs to get in and create vector artwork, and we're gonna talk more about what vector artwork is versus raster artwork. What will you learn? Okay, we're gonna learn a lot today. We're gonna talk about what Illustrator is, I'm gonna go a little further into that and show you guys some cool examples of Illustrator artwork. We're gonna...
go through and just learn about the interface, talk about creating documents, working with art boards. How many of you guys have worked with art boards? Okay. Work a little bit with art boards, we're gonna go through and talk about color, type, shapes, drawing, all kinds of stuff, but once again we're starting from ground up, which is great. And at the end we're gonna go through and talk about what it is all about, what is saving in the different formats that we need to use? I hate this slide. Who am I? I wrote the book, yes. I've written the book for the past six versions and I do a lot with Illustrator, a lot with Illustrator. I actually have a website, brianwoodtraining.com, Twitter if you guys wanna jump on. I wanna tell you my YouTube channel because I've got a lot of great free, it's YouTube, free videos on Illustrator, inDesign, Photoshop, all that stuff you guys can take a look at. Let's get started, shall we? Does everybody have Illustrator open? Let me close this up here. All right so I wanna talk first about what Illustrator is, because Illustrator is one of those programs that kind of fits into the creative cloud these days. We have Illustrator, inDesign and Photoshop. How many of you have used inDesign? Okay. How many of you have used Photoshop? That's kind of a silly question, I know. But Illustrator fits in there because it is vector. Now what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna open up a file that I've got. You don't have to do this, just kind of hang out for one second. And I wanna talk about what vector versus raster is. Now when we work with Illustrator we're actually creating artwork. I'm gonna zoom in here. We're creating artwork that is composed of points and paths. Okay? You're gonna be drawing a lot of things. Does anybody like to draw or is good at drawing? When you hear drawing I'm not trying to scare you because there's a lot of ways to create in here, we don't have to be good at drawing, okay? We're creating artwork, that's a great thing. Vector artwork is actually clean and smooth which means that we could create a logo that's this big, you could take that thing and scale it up to the side of a billboard and it would still look and print beautifully because it's vector. It's made of little points called anchor points and paths between them. It's all based on math. We don't need to go further than that. How many of you work in Photoshop? I already asked that, I know. But when you work in Photoshop you work with raster images. Raster images basically composed of pixels of color, so you kind of have a mosaic, and when you create these little pixels of color if you try to scale that and go bigger without the help of Photoshop it's gonna look really bad, okay? Because it's gotta take those color squares and just make them bigger so you're gonna start to see a stair step pyramid type thing going on, okay? This is why we love vector. Vector can do all kinds of things. What I'm gonna do real quick here is I'm gonna open up some examples that I just, I've got about six billion in here but we're gonna run through a few of these, okay? You can create logos, you can create artwork for tee shirts. I know companies that will actually create the dashboard of a card when they want to design it using Illustrator. We can go in and do things like work on web design for instance. This is actually a web design right here. We can do UX and UI prototyping if we want. This is a beautiful design, which is actually one of the files in my book created in here. You can see it has kind of a vector quality. When I click on objects out here you'll notice if I zoom in here a little bit that it actually is made of little points that we could go in and we could actually start to work with and start to edit. That's vector right there. Beautifully illustrative. But also you can be a little more realistic if you want to. There's some really cool things you can do in here. But a lot of us are gonna use it simply. There's a little more artwork, I'll show you that one. We can use it for objects that we're gonna use in inDesign. We can create vector artwork for that. We can take this stuff over to Photoshop if we want to and combine the two using raster images and maybe vector artwork for logos and different things like that. This is an example. Yeah, this is my signature. Whenever I do PDF forms, I came in here with the pencil tool and went, and just use that for my PDF signature. You're gonna see we can create things like, let's say marketing materials if we want to in here. This program has what are called artboards, or just think of them as pages, okay? We can go in and we can do things like add type or lay down type. We can work with raster images directly in here. We can create our different vector artwork and we can save about up to 100 pages if we want to in single file. So we have a hundred art boards we can work with. And then of course we can go a little more realistic if we want to. This is an example of using raster artwork that we can bring in here maybe from Photoshop or something like that, and create ourselves a design. These are some logo icons that we're creating here. Maybe for web, UI, UX, that type of thing. And then a lot of us are gonna use this for just logo design. We can do logo design in here, do a lot of different types. I'm just gonna quickly run through a few of these. This is for one of my companies right here. There's another one obviously, that's mine. But the idea here is that when we see logos out in the world a lot of times we want to be able to take that logo and scale it. We want to use it on a business card, we want to use it on letterhead, whatever we're doing, website, et cetera, and here this affords us the ability as vector artwork to do that. Does that kind of make sense? The vector thing? Okay.
Class Materials
Bonus Materials with Purchase
Ratings and Reviews
KATIE Y
I am a pretty computer literate person but an Ai beginner i.e. I am completely new to the Creative Cloud/Adobe Illustrator. (This is also the first time I've used CreativeLive.) I think this course it is fantastic. The pace is good as is the content which progressed logically and covers all the basics you'd hope it would. The course is 2 full days' worth of material but it is broken down into segments so you can revisit or skip through as you need to. The presenter is really personable and easy to watch (even for me, a Londoner!). I would also say I think it is pretty good value for money -- I am currently enrolled on a part time course, basically doing the same sort of stuff, and I have to say this is better and a bit cheaper! I definitely recommend it to you!
jackflash
A brilliantly designed course. it's almost magic. It's everything you hope for in a follow-along software class. Brian Wood has engineered it so that you start on a project that just needs basics, and then you move on to more & more complicated projects, and almost without realizing it you've learned Illustrator. This doesn't just happen -- Wood has clearly put a LOT of effort into creating this course. Here's one trivial example: he doesn't overload you with a lot of keyboard shortcuts right at the beginning -- you start with the actions themselves, using the (admittedly tedious but easy) pulldown menus, and then after you're comfortable with what you're doing, he'll throw in the shortcut. It may seem obvious, but so many instructors feel they have to give you an extensive foundation of definitions, shortcuts, interfaces, etc., before you ever do anything. Good stuff to know, but you'll never remember it. Wood has you up and working almost immediately. And he's a joy to listen to, at a perfect pace. Highly recommended.
Philippe LIENARD
Top course. Very well explained, clear, good examples, pleasant teacher. I like it and recommend it. One suggestion, it would be nice to have a detailed table of content of the course in the material. For instance, it took me quite a while to find back the part of the course where how to make a gear was explained.
Student Work
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Adobe Illustrator