The Many Uses of Illustrator
| Look all around you. Billboard signs along the side of the highway, packages of cereal and groceries at the supermarket, navigation icons on a Web site, posters announcing an exhibit at a museum, advertisements throughout magazines and newspapers, logos and artwork on t-shirts and sportswear, animated cartoons and feature films, user interfaces on your computer and cell phones . . . all of theseand moreare created with the help of Adobe Illustrator. Illustrator is used by creative individuals who want to express their creativity in print, on the Web, in video, and on wireless devices. The program itself is distributed in many different languages, and you can find millions of Illustrator users across the globe. Of course, with such a diverse user base, Illustrator itself is used and applied in many ways. To get an idea of what I mean, take a look at how some creative professionals use Illustrator and how this book can help them.
Creative Genius: The World of Graphic DesignIt's difficult to define a graphic designer because the title itself encompasses so many different types of design. For the most part, graphic designers specialize in a particular field of design like corporate, advertising, direct mail, or even typography. Graphic designers work on a variety of projects and usually have experience with several programs including Photoshop and InDesign or QuarkXPress. For these kinds of users, Illustrator serves as a creative springboard for designs such as logos and type treatments, ad storyboards and campaigns, spot illustrations, maps, charts, and general design elements. If you're a graphic designer, you'll find the following chapters most helpful as you read through this book:
Telling a Story: Illustration and AnimationTo an animator or an illustrator, Adobe Illustrator is an empty canvas waiting to come alive. In a world of animated feature films and TV shows, it's easy to understand the benefits of drawing characters and animations directly on a computer. Its ability to repurpose art for almost any need makes Illustrator the perfect environment for creating animations and illustrations. Adobe didn't name their product Illustrator without reason. Artists create illustrations for children's books, magazine covers and articles, packages, and a variety of other products, and they use Illustrator to take advantage of the high quality and precision available in the program. A variety of tools like gradient meshes, blends, and even 3D, allow illustrators to translate the images they see in their mind into reality. If you're an animator or an illustrator, you'll find the following chapters most helpful as you read through this book:
Interactive Experience: Interface and Web DesignWeb designers have a language all their own, which includes acronyms like HTML, XML, SVG, SWF, GIF, JPEG, PNG, and CSS. Illustrator supports these and other Web-specific technologies, giving Web designers access to the formats in which they need to deliver their designs. Taking advantage of Illustrator's object-based design environment, Web designers can lay out precise navigation elements, buttons, and entire pages. In today's fast-paced world, everyone needs a presence on the Web. However, businesses find that they also need to provide content in print format. By creating art in Illustrator, Web designers can easily use that art for both Web and print layouts, thus reducing the need to re-create art for each medium. If you're a Web designer, you'll find the following chapters most helpful as you read through this book:
Tomorrow's Trends: Fashion and Apparel DesignIf you're thinking about bathing suits while it's snowing outside, you're either dreaming about going on vacation or you're a fashion designer. What type of clothes you design may directly correlate to the seasons of the year, but designing apparel is also a highly creative field that demands the most of a designer. Illustrator's object-based approach to design makes it easier to work with body shapes, apparel guidelines, and product labels. Fashion designers can create symbol libraries of repeating objects like motifs, buttons, buckles, and zippers. Illustrator can also create pattern fills and simulate shading and realism using transparency effects. If you're a fashion designer, you'll find the following chapters most helpful as you read through this book:
Thinking Outside the Box: Package DesignIf you're good at reading upside-down text, you just might be a package designer. That's because most package designs are created flat on one sheet, with different panels facing different directions. Once printed, the entire package is folded up so that it appears visually correct. Package designers use Illustrator to define spot colors, place images from Photoshop, and apply trapping settingsall in an effort to grab a potential buyer's attention. Due to production requirements, package designers often need to be able to make minute adjustments to colors and artwork. By building files in Illustrator, these designers can control nearly every aspect of the file and meet their deadlines. If you're a package designer, you'll find the following chapters most helpful as you read through this book:
The Science of Design: Art and Print ProductionProduction artists are a separate breed (I would knowI'm one of the them); to them, everything in a file matters. Illustrator is a tool that allows production artists to dig deep into graphics files and make the edits and changes that are necessary to print a file correctly. Whether for producing or using spot colors, overprint commands, transparency flattening, or generally cleaning up paths and shapes, production artists have come to rely on Illustrator. Because it can be used to open and edit generic EPS and PDF files (and many other file formats), Illustrator has become a utility that is a required tool for art production. If you cringe at the thought of an RGB file with overprints, transparencies, and spot colors, then you're certainly a production artist. You might not care much about how to create nice brush strokes, but you care about simplifying paths so that they print faster. If you're a production artist, you'll find the following chapters most helpful as you read through this book:
The Melting Pot of Design: Creativity for EveryoneIf you didn't identify with any of the titles I've listed so far, that's perfectly okay. In fact, it's nearly impossible to list all of the kinds of people who use Illustrator every day. Because Illustrator has so many uses, the people who use it are very diverse. They may include doctors, lawyers, architects, signage and environmental designers, video and film specialistseven a restaurant owner who is designing a menu cover. The important thing to realize is that Illustrator is for everyone who wants to express their creativity, and that makes for one big happy family!
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EAN: 2147483647
Pages: 147
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