Introduction to Adobe Illustrator

Week One Outline 

What is Adobe Illustrator?

• When should I use Illustrator
• Vs. Photoshop
• Vs. In-Design

Creating a new Document

• Artboards as Pages
• Your Design size compared to standard document sizes.
• Bleed values have to do with images that extend beyond the side of the art board.
• Keep in mind that most (home / office) printers require a "grip" area around the edge of the page. To be able to do edge to edge printing, you may need to send your work to a press.
• For those of you getting started, you may wish to explore the templates that are included with Illustrator.

The Document Window

• Imagable area - The area that is currently printable on your artboard.
• Edge of Page - The full size of your page (or Artboard)
• Non-Imagable Area - The area of the page that cannot be printed to.
• Scratch Area - The area around the Artboard, where you may place clippings you are working with.

A Basic Introduction to the Tool Panel

• Selection
• Direct Selection
• Lasso
• Text
• Line Segment
• Shape
• Eraser
• Eyedropper
• Color Selector
• Stroke
• Fill
• No Color (Red Diagonal Line)
• Swapping Stroke and Fill

Introducing the other Panels

• Expand / Collapse / Move panels as you like.

Workspaces

Moving Your Work Around the Screen

• Hand tool
• Pressing Space while any tool (except Text) is active temporarily gives you a Hand tool.
  
• Scrolling up and down with the Scroll Wheel
• Scrolling left and right with CTRL-Scroll Wheel
• Magnifying Glass Tool
• ALT-Click (Zoom Out)
  
• Zooming in and out with ALT-Scroll Wheel

Using the Help System

• Locating an overview of the Tools Panel 
• Workspace / Tools / Tools Panel Overview
• Keyboard Shortcuts are directly off the top of the help tree (bottom of the list)
• Using Search (Zooming Out)

Week Two Outline