How Is this Book Organized?

There are two possible approaches to using this book. You can go through it cover to cover. Or you can use it as a reference to look up features you need. The book will work either way. If you re new to Illustrator, I d strongly suggest setting aside some quality time and working through the book from beginning to end. It will be helpful to at least familiarize yourself with the exploration of the Illustrator interface in Chapter 1 before either proceeding from beginning to end or jumping around in the book.

As you read and refer to this book, take time to check out the artwork used to illustrate the feature you re exploring. Since many of the projects used as models in the book are plundered from the archives of Bruce K. Hopkins, you ll get a chance both to see a feature demonstrated and to see how that feature is used in the real world trenches of professional design and illustration.

At any point in the process (including right now), feel free to jump to the back of the book and check out the Behind the Scenes: A Gallery with Techniques from the Pros section. There you ll find a representative selection of accessible projects (a poster, a map, a CD cover, a business card, and more) created for the real world. Turn to this section for inspiration, to see the techniques you re mastering applied to completed projects, or just to browse some very cool projects. The artwork in the Behind the Scenes section is deconstructed so you can see how professional artists and designers created it.

Illustrator is used widely in both Macintosh and PC environments. We ve done everything we could to make this book bilingual for Mac and PC users. Where keystroke or menu commands are different for different operating systems, you ll find it easy to identify the instructions for your operating system and environment. Where there are different keystrokes for Mac and Windows (PC), I ll put the Windows keystrokes in parentheses. For instance, where the instructions say to hold down the OPTION ( ALT ) key, Mac users will hold down the OPTION key and PC users will hold down the ALT key. If a menu option works one way in OSX, and differently for Windows and OS9 users (we tried to make this book as backward-compatible as possible), then the instructions will be spelled out explicitly. For instance, if I want you to access the Preferences dialog box, I ll tell you to choose Edit Preferences in OS9 or Windows, or Illustrator Preferences in OSX. And we ve kept the screen shots as closely cropped as possible so you won t be distracted by operating system elements foreign to your own work environment. Finally, I ve compiled separate lists of the most useful Illustrator keyboard shortcuts for Mac and PC and included this list inside the back cover of the book.