Adobe Illustrator CS4 - Introduction — A 2-day course

 Open Public Course Closed In-House Course

Synopsis

The Illustrator course is designed to provide the participant with the skills necessary to create their own illustrations and for desktop publishing of brochures, posters & flyers. If you have never used Illustrator or have used Illustrator but perhaps not as effectively as you could this course is for you.

This is an introductory course for designers and budding Developers new to the Illustrator environment, or those that have not had formal training. Students will produce an exciting graphic project using both the classic features and the new and improved tools in Illustrator and will leave this class with the ability to create and incorporate vector graphics for different projects.

Course Objectives

Upon successful completion of this course, students will be able to:

• Draw and understand Bezier curves, the root of drawing in Illustrator
• Create a logo using simple shapes
• Accurately place and measure objects in the Illustration window
• Trace and Colour your hand drawn artwork with Live Trace, Live Paint and Live Colour
• Save illustrations for both print and web purposes

Intended Audience

Graphic designers, or people transitioning into a design job or taking on design responsibilities, who need to use Adobe Illustrator to create illustrations, logos, advertisements or other graphic documents. They may have little or no experience with Illustrator, although they may already use Adobe InDesign and Adobe Photoshop.

Prerequisites

We will assume little or no prior knowledge of Acrobat in this course but you should have a basic working knowledge of either the Windows or Mac interface as well as exposure to either Microsoft Word, Excel or PowerPoint.

Publicly scheduled dates, locations, and prices

Course Contents

Creating basic Documents

• Explore the prebuilt Document Profiles
• Shortcuts to navigate the Artboard effectively
• Create custom Workspaces

Drawing in Illustrator

• Draw Paths with the Pen tool
• Add, delete or adjust points along a path
• Understand how Bézier Curves work
• Freeform Drawing tools
• Live Trace to transform images or hand drawn sketches into vector artworks that can be further adjusted
• Create Logo using simple Shapes
• Discovering basic Blends
• Symbols in Illustrator & Symbol Sprayer options

Modifying Objects

• Lasso select and the other goodies in the Select Menu
• Be precise using Smart Guides, Grids & Guidelines
• Align, Group & Duplicate to achieve better results
• Transform objects with Twirl, Bloat & other Warp tools
• Layers palette: Hide & Lock Objects
• Intro to Isolation Mode for effective editing

Working with Colours in Illustrator

• Difference between Swatches and Colour palette
• Applying colour to Stroke and/or Fill
• Adjusting Stroke attributes with Stroke panel
• Introducing Gradients & Patterns

Text in Illustrator

• Point, Area and Type on a path
• Import Body Type & fix Spelling Errors
• Find and Replace Text or Insert Typographic Characters
• Create Text Outlines to design your own fancy headlines

Outputting your Artwork

• Defining cropping area
• Saving your artwork in vector formats
• Save for Web & Devices