Adobe® Illustrator® Creative Cloud®: Essentials for Creating Projects

Lesson Info

GPU Performance in Adobe® Illustrator®

We can now, if your machine supports it, on Mac and Windows, we have GPU Preview to be able to work with. Now, it's an acceleration. It's using the GPU to be able to do things like zoom, and preview, and move around, and things like that. I don't really care what that means. It just means that it's cooler. So when we zoom and do things, it's actually faster and smoother. When you first launch Illustrator, like the first time, it's actually gonna come up with a message up here usually that's quick. And it says like GPU was enabled or detected, you're good to go type of thing. Okay? If you look right up here, you're gonna see a rocket ship. If that rocket ship looks like a rocket ship, you're good to go. You get all this extra feature. If that rocket ship has a little like zero slashy thing through it, you don't have that. Okay? If I click on that little rocket ship right there, you're gonna see GPU performance. So it's gotta detect a compatible GPU. It just means does your machine suppo...

rt it basically. If it is compatible, it's gonna say, here's mine down here. You can see all this stuff. It's gonna turn on what's called GPU Performance. And we also have what's called Animated Zoom. Now the Animated Zoom, even if you use this stuff, you can turn Animated Zoom off if you don't like it. I'll show you what that is. We kinda went through it before, but, I'll click OK. And I'm gonna zoom in here. So, I'm gonna go to my zoom tool. Let me just go to the zoom tool. And I'm gonna zoom in a bit. And you're gonna see this is the animated zoom. This is pretty darn complex artwork if you look at this thing. And it's doing it pretty smoothly. Okay? The GPU performance is pretty amazing. The other thing that's kind of amazing is that we can now zoom, like I said in the beginning, towards the beginning, of the class, we can now instead of just doing 6400% which was what we could do before, we can do 64000%. So, I love this file because it's got a little bit of hidden stuff in here. If you focus, look right down here, you're gonna see, I'm gonna zoom into this guy. There's also a little guy down here, which if I go to 64000% percent, you can see. So we can zoom in pretty closely. And it does a really good job of keeping all the paths, and the stroke weights, and all that kinda stuff. The other thing too is that if we do, let me zoom out just a little bit here, we have a smoother panning. So if I go to my hand tool or if I use that, which is the space bar, I can actually do a lot smoother. In previous versions of Illustrator, it would kinda stutter-step a little bit as you dragged it, but now it's actually really, really smooth, which is nice. Once again, that's part of the GPU kinda using that to be able to get it done. So we've got zooming. We've got animated zooming. The other thing we can do, let me zoom out, is I can actually click and hold down, and you can animate zoom in just like this. Sometimes this is really helpful, just because you wanna kinda get into a certain area. And if I zoom out, I'm using the Option key. It does the same thing. So doing an animated zoom. Kinda cool. All right. I mean that's pretty much working with GPU performance. If you decide that your machine, maybe it decides, it determines that your machine can handle it, but you don't wanna use it. Just turn it off. You can come right up here to the little rocket ship. Click on it. Just turn of GPU Performance. And if you do turn this off, I'll click OK, the next time you go to zoom, you're gonna get this. It's gonna be a zoom box it's called. The old school. And if I let go, it'll zoom in. It's kind of a let down. Once you got to the animated zoom, you don't go back. I find that that's just the case. I think it also, if you take a look, you can still do the 64000% percent. It still lets you do that, but it's kinda rough. So, there we go.

The world’s top designers use Adobe® Illustrator® for its powerful, vector-based drawing environment – and now you can gain fluency in it, as well! Join Brian Wood for a dynamic course on everything you need to know about Adobe® Illustrator®.

By walking you through a series of projects on Adobe® Illustrator®, Brian will give you a comprehensive toolkit that will answer any need, including:

Getting started in Adobe® Illustrator® and familiarizing yourself with its workspace
Creating color using a variety of methods
Creating and transforming artwork, working with text, and importing images
Tricks and techniques for drawing: selecting and editing, and working with layers
Creating custom patterns, brushes, and symbols
Exploring built-in visual effects libraries

You’ll also tackle more advanced Adobe® Illustrator® topics, like the perspective grid, Creative Cloud libraries, effects, live paint groups and selection, blends, and the shape builder tool.

Don't have Adobe® Creative Cloud yet? Get it now and save 20% so you can follow along with the course!

Software Used: Adobe Illustrator CC 2015.3.1

Lessons

Reviews

I am a pretty computer literate person but an Ai beginner i.e. I am completely new to the Creative Cloud/Adobe Illustrator. (This is also the first time I've used CreativeLive.) I think this course it is fantastic. The pace is good as is the content which progressed logically and covers all the basics you'd hope it would. The course is 2 full days' worth of material but it is broken down into segments so you can revisit or skip through as you need to. The presenter is really personable and easy to watch (even for me, a Londoner!). I would also say I think it is pretty good value for money -- I am currently enrolled on a part time course, basically doing the same sort of stuff, and I have to say this is better and a bit cheaper! I definitely recommend it to you!
A brilliantly designed course. it's almost magic. It's everything you hope for in a follow-along software class. Brian Wood has engineered it so that you start on a project that just needs basics, and then you move on to more & more complicated projects, and almost without realizing it you've learned Illustrator. This doesn't just happen -- Wood has clearly put a LOT of effort into creating this course. Here's one trivial example: he doesn't overload you with a lot of keyboard shortcuts right at the beginning -- you start with the actions themselves, using the (admittedly tedious but easy) pulldown menus, and then after you're comfortable with what you're doing, he'll throw in the shortcut. It may seem obvious, but so many instructors feel they have to give you an extensive foundation of definitions, shortcuts, interfaces, etc., before you ever do anything. Good stuff to know, but you'll never remember it. Wood has you up and working almost immediately. And he's a joy to listen to, at a perfect pace. Highly recommended.
Top course. Very well explained, clear, good examples, pleasant teacher. I like it and recommend it. One suggestion, it would be nice to have a detailed table of content of the course in the material. For instance, it took me quite a while to find back the part of the course where how to make a gear was explained.