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Graphic design & illustration using
INDEX
Create your Certiport Account
Create your Certiport Account
In five weeks from now, we believe that you are ready to take your first test. You will need to create a Certiport account in order to log in on the day of the test. That's why you will create your account today, and let your teacher know what your account.
Watch the video below and follow each step.
When you've successfully created an account
Project 1a: Overview of Adobe ILLUSTRATOR
Project 1a: Overview of Adobe ILLUSTRATOR
What is Adobe Illustrator
What is Adobe Illustrator?
What is Adobe Illustrator?
Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard in vector drawing—for everything from minimalistic logos to full-blown illustrations. The essentials of Illustrator start with the use of the pen tool, but also include artboards, workspaces, layers, and shapes. How do you make selections, draw and build complex shapes using the Illustrator drawing tools, and precisely color artwork with tools like swatches and gradient fills. How to organize artwork into groups and layers, combine and clean up paths, work with type and effects, export your work, and much more will be covered in the next few weeks.
The interface
The interface
When you first open Adobe Illustrator, you’ll come to a welcome screen. This screen has several useful things for you: easy access to recent documents, templates for projects, and quick links to open or create a new document.
Let’s go ahead and click Create New… on the left.
The New Document screen will come up. You’ll get used to this screen quickly. It has ready to use templates for different mobile, web, and print designs. There are also downloadable projects that you can alter and use.
For now, let’s just focus on starting a new document. The main field you should worry about for now are the Width and Height of your document. Here, I chose a width of 990 px and a height of 540 px, but it doesn’t really matter.
Not only should you choose the size appropriate for your project, but you can always change this later.
We’ll be talking about Artboards soon, but for now, just know that this will allow you to draw multiple images within the same document.
Now, your interface will likely look a little different than mine. You can customize your interface as you become more comfortable with your personal workflow. I love how customizable Illustrator is, and am always looking to make my process more streamlined. The less time I’m looking around for the right thing, the more time I can spend creating!
Tools Interface
Tools Interface
On the left side of the screen, you’ll find the tools bar. I separate the tools into a few types:
Create objects
Manipulate objects
Text tools
Color tools
Adjust your view
Panels
Panels
On the right side of your screen are the panels. Panels extend functionality and add options to your workflow. If you want to see a list of all the panels, go into the Window menu (menu at the very top of the program). Again, in future tutorials, you’ll get experience with these panels. For now, I’ll just introduce you to the four that I use most often.
Color panel: change the color of objects
Text panels (Character & Paragraph)
Pathfinder panel: Alter objects, such as combining or subtracting
Align panel: Align objects to each other or the artboard
Just knowing these two simple things should make the entire interface a bit more comfortable for you.
The Pen Tool
The Pen Tool
The Pen tool, found in the Toolbar, is one of the most powerful drawing tools in Illustrator. With it, you can create and edit anchor points and paths.
Set stroke and fill before drawing
Set stroke and fill before drawing
To start with the Pen tool, select the Pen tool in the Toolbar and, in the Properties panel, set the stroke weight to 1 pt, the color to black, and the fill to none.
Create straight lines
Create straight lines
To create straight lines with the Pen tool, click and release to create an anchor point. Move the pointer, and you’ll see a preview of the path you are creating. Click and release to create another anchor point. You can continue clicking and releasing in different areas to create more anchor points for the path.
To close a path, move the pointer over the original anchor point and, when a circle shows next to the pointer, press the Shift key and click the end point. To stop drawing a path without closing it, press the Escape key.
Create curves
Create curves
To draw a curve when creating an anchor point, drag to create direction handles, and then release. The more you drag when creating or editing anchor point handles, the more curve the path has.
Create corner points (change path direction)
Create corner points (change path direction)
To change the direction of a path while drawing, drag to create a smooth point (a curve). Release the mouse button. Move the pointer over the end of a direction handle, press the Option key (macOS) or Alt key (Windows), and drag the end of the handle to split them.
Remove direction handles
Remove direction handles
To remove a direction handle as you draw with the Pen tool, so that you can go from a curve to a straight line, click back on the last anchor point created to remove the handle. Then continue drawing.
The Pen tools to create lines and shapes. The Add-, Delete- and Anchor Point tool can be used to alter the line or shape after its creationg.
The Curvature tool takes a redesigned approach to drawing paths in Illustrator. While the Pen tool is more of a precision tool that requires you to think about where to place an anchor point and how to pull out direction lines to control line segments, the Curvature tool takes a more intuitive approach to drawing by asking the user to click along the path you want to create, while drawing along that path. Another big difference is the lack of modifier keys required to draw with the Curvature tool.
The Shaper tool helps you create complex and beautiful designs by drawing, stacking, and placing shapes together, and then simply combining, merging, deleting, or moving them.
The pencil tool is a great tool for creating freeform shapes and lines in Adobe Illustrator. Select it from the tools dialog box and click and drag to draw. ... This will reshape the line into the direction of wherever you began drawing your line. In this example, the pencil tool is used before the end of the original line.
Smooth Tool in Illustrator is one of the tools that the user widely uses. The smooth tool is used for making the curvy and rough edges of the artworks and objects that are generally present in the vector-based program smooth and glossy.
The Path Eraser tool lets you erase parts of a path by drawing along the path. This tool is useful when you want to limit what you erase to a path segment, such as one edge of a triangle.
the Join Tool is essentially a brush, but unlike other brush tools in Illustrator there are no editable parameters and the brush size is fixed. What it does do is join segments and points together quickly and easily.
The Bézier Game
The Bézier Game
Assignment 1 A: The Pen tool
Assignment 1 A: The Pen tool
Download the image from the assets folder
Use the pen tool to replicate the examples as precisely as possible with the minimum amount of points.
Place your image on your Spark page and describe briefly what you have done.
Test 1: Kahoot basic soft knowledge
Test 1: Kahoot basic soft knowledge
This is a new course with a variety of students. In order to set a starting point, we will start with a Kahoot test. The test contains basic questions about working with Illustrator. What do you know already and what do you need to succeed?
Theory 1: File formats
Theory 1: File formats
When you save files from Illustrator, the three main choices you have for print production work are Adobe Illustrator Document (.ai), Illustrator EPS (.eps), and Adobe PDF (.pdf). The following is a brief rundown of the formats you can choose to save your files as when using Illustrator.
Adobe Illustrator Document (.ai)
This is Adobe’s native Illustrator format, and only Illustrator is able to read this file format. The data contained in the file is based on PDF, but it isn’t a format that Acrobat can read correctly. When saving in .ai format, you retain all your editability and transparency in your file. When you save your file as an .ai file, Illustrator includes a PDF 1.4 composite preview inside the file in an unflattened form. The .ai format is the best format to save your file as for internal use while you’re still working on the file, as well as for placing into Photoshop or InDesign. The .ai format is my preferred method for saving files, as I use InDesign for my page layout. However if you use Quark XPress, you’ll have to stick with the older .eps format explained below.
Illustrator EPS (.eps)
This long-standing file format, which is short for Encapsulated PostScript, is supported by most all standard graphics applications. Unfortunately, .eps files do not support transparency, so files you create that contain transparency are “flattened” so other programs can import them. When you save as an .eps, most effects are expanded and text may or may not be broken apart in order to flatten the file – however Illustrator saves a copy of the file in .ai format inside the .eps file so that you can edit the file later in Illustrator if you wish. The .eps format has been widely used as the “standard” file format for saving artwork to be used for print production work with Quark XPress for many years, but recently began loosing love from users due to its large file size and lack of support for transparency. Personally, I no longer use the .eps format. Since the introduction of InDesign and Smart Objects in Photoshop, I find the .ai format for flexible and the file sizes more manageable.
Adobe PDF (.pdf)
We all know what a PDF is. When you save a file from Illustrator as a .pdf file, Illustrator saves the data so that any PDF reader can understand and display the file. Thankfully, Illustrator saves a copy of the file in native .ai format inside the PDF file which is unflattened for later editing – as long as you remember to leave the Preserve Illustrator Editing Capabilities checkbox ticked as it is as a default. If you uncheck that box, the file size is drastically reduced, but so are your options for editing the file later. Text will be virtually uneditable, effects are flattened, etc. I generally don’t recommend saving your files as PDFs from Illustrator.
Illustrator Template (.ait)
This format is exactly what it says. It’s a template format for Illustrator that allows you to save your file as a template for using as a “building block” for later files.
SVG Compressed (.svgz) and SVG (.svg)
SVG stands for Scalable Vector Graphics and is an XML markup language for describing two-dimensional vector graphics, both static and animated and is an open standard created by the World Wide Web Consortium. The SVG format can contain vector shapes and paths, raster graphics (images) and text. The SVG format is mostly used for Web-based work, and is beyond the scope of this article, so I won’t bother to go into it here.
Export options
Illustrator also allows you to “export” your file to nearly a dozen other formats (which also means it can read them) such as .jpg, .png, .swf (Flash), .bmp, .tif, .txt (text format), .wmv (Windows meta file) and .dxf (AutoCAD Interchange Format). Overall, Illustrator has a lot of flexibility in the formats it saves as, allowing you to maximize the file use in other applications.
Project 1B: Pixel Perfect ARTBOARDS
Project 1B: Pixel Perfect ARTBOARDS
Working PIXEL PERFECT
Working PIXEL PERFECT
In the world of UX and UI it's important to work pixel perfect. When you zoom in to your Illustrator artwork far enough you'll see the pixel grid. The trick is to work exactly on this grid in order to get sharp images. Working not in a pixel perfect way will give you fuzzy images.
ARTBOARDS
ARTBOARDS
An Artboard in Illustrator works like a physical piece of paper on a desk. Similar to pages in Indesign, artboards can be different sizes and orientations and be arranged however suits your workflow.
With the Artboard tool you can create multi-page documents. In fact, a single Illustrator file can contain up to 100 artboards so you can keep all your design work in one place.
Assignment 1 B: Creating documents, pixel perfect and artboards
Assignment 1 B: Creating documents, pixel perfect and artboards
Download the image from the assets folder
Follow the steps in the video and try to understand what you are doing. Know the theory behind it.
Place your image on your Spark page and describe briefly what you have done.
Study 1: LinkedIn Learning
Study 1: LinkedIn Learning
LinkedIn Learning
As a student at the GLR you are entitled to make use of LinkedIn Learning. Make sure to sign up and sign in with your "mijnglr" account details.
Watch the video's from "Cert Prep: Adobe Certified Associate - Illustrator" chapter 1, 2 and 3.
Domain one is the most difficult because it's a lot of theory, but you must master it!
Note:
Add both projects and your notes from today to your Spark page.
Socials:
Leave an image from your work today on Instagram with use of the hashtags #AdobeEduCreative #GLRVibes #ACAChallenge
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