Lessons

Lesson Info

Introduction and Overview

everybody out there ready to learn some. I'm excited to be kind of wrapping up via what we call it the creative APS starter kit. So I know you've done some illustrator classes, Melissa, and we're my last one as well. And this is really going to get back to the basics. And so I know I glossed over a lot of my ends, the other one, which is the essentials where we dug into some of the deeper tools this is, how do we get to those? What is the basis for all of that? So we're going to start with some very basic stuff, and the 1st 1 I want to talk about is, Why use Illustrator? And because we're learning all these different APS, especially because we have a photo shop in design and illustrator. Those three is far as print designers and even Web designers, those this kind of work together. But a lot of people have a little confusion about why we use the tools that we use. And so, basically in a print workflow, which is my background but also even digital workflow. Now, as faras distributions o...

f PdF's and electronic books, things like that we basically create the artwork that we need an illustrator photo shop and a lot of times they funnel through two in design. And so that's kind of how I want to look at it. But why do we choose illustrator, say over photo shop? Well, the name is kind of the tent is kind of in the names of those programs that we've got photo shop, a lot of photo, either photos or photo realistic work. And of course, we all know, hopefully that that's pixel based. We hear these terms and I'm gonna explain and show what that is. An illustrator works with things like illustrations, things that mean so they can look photo realistic as well. And then, of course, because it's adobe, everything integrates well so we can drop Illustrated files into Photoshopped photo shop files into illustrator and and then we can dump it all into in design at the end. So again, why use illustrator over something? And so I think once we start looking at what we create, hopefully everybody's minds will get an idea. Why do I create this in photo shop versus Illustrator? You had mentioned doing your logo in photo shop in the beginning and just a little part of me cringe. Just a little farm. If your if your logo is a photo, then that's greatest photo. But, you know, as we're talking about and kind of mentioned blowing it up in a really big that's the first thing that we lose, right Is that resolution. So I used usually suggest people that's hand drawn art, logo elements, background elements, even some type elements. And Adobe has been really good at getting all the same type engines in tow, all their products. But I'm still sort of a stickler on if you're doing a lot of type. I do that in in design, but a lot of type that goes into logos and graphic elements. I still do an illustrator, of course. So I just want to open up a couple of examples. Actually, someone's gonna launch this, all right, so I'm gonna go ahead and open up a couple of examples that I have just to kind of show you what things could be created. So maybe we have something like just like said, logos will start with that. So if I open up this page, you know. So I just have some logo ideas that are on here. So this type of blow go If your logo again is a photo of something you might do that in photo shop and put the text on top of it in photo shop, especially if you want to use a lot of photo shops filters. But if I think I'm going to doom or manipulation to the elements of the logo, I'm gonna come into illustrator to do that. And again, you can kind of see I don't have any photo shop samples of anything. But, you know, you know what? You working and Photoshopped I assume most people probably have their core. They're mostly working with photo shop, and they're trying to figure out what these other programs air all about. So just kind of get a feel of what things look like. They don't look photo realistic. They have sort of, ah, hand drawn or a line drawn sort of feel to them. So that's one item that I might use illustrator for and infographics infographics air huge. Right now you see infographics everywhere, right? Most of those that you see are done, most likely in illustrator, right? So it's a lot of vector objects, a lot of clean Leinart, things like that. And so this might be something we use illustrator for. All right. So just some sample text here, and we've got some nice, you know, shading. It looked almost three d When I blow up on it and blow into a little bit, you can see that, you know, it's not. It's more this hand shading. Sorry, that can actually use the hand tool here. My scroll bars want to jump so much because I'm zoomed in so much. Nice, even. Kind of get an idea of what that looks like. Just that clean lines, colors fills, and we're gonna talk about all that in just a little while. This is the show Intel portion of the same session. All right, let's open up something else. We have another graphic that's here, right? So if something like that, you know, again, it's a nice logo. Look to it. It has some kind of fun, clean colors, lines. And as I roll over each item, hopefully you can see that little things air just blowing up on the screen say those were little red lines. What that is are just all these little individual elements. Where is a photo shop? You've got an image made up of pixels. But it's basically one item, right? These are several elements all put together on top of each other in an illustrator. And again we'll look at creating all these as well. How about a map? Everybody loves maps again. This goes back to the whole infographics thing. This is entirely a vector based object. Want to come and look at this and again? Roll over these items? Hopefully you can see that things were being highlighted. Paths. I can select items and see that each of those, um are separate objects that are there. That I think is if you create a map or you get a map, we're gonna talk about where to get things and how to go about, you know, not having to start from scratch. I couldn't start from scratch on this. First of all, I have to know what the shape of Africa was. I can barely draw the United States, right? So I have Teoh start somewhere. And in this case, it's really nice that most of these are individual so I can work with those individual items and say this country, Let's pretend Chad is here. Everybody from Africa will be shaking their head and go, You're not even close. Chad's over here. I don't know. So we pick a country. I'd like that country to be green so you know, color green or whatever. So we're able to work with the individual elements with it instead of it. Seeing it as one thing I see is one thing, but the program sees it as a collection of all these individual elements. I got one more sample here. Oh yeah, there's one that's a little bit more. It's not photo realistic, but it's a little more artistic. So it looks, you know, it looks kind of painted, sort of like you might have done in Photoshop. I especially love these leaves down here. These air Not mind these air samples that I have the great folks for Tolia have let me use all these images for them. And just like I said, don't start from scratch. Could I have start from scratch from this? No, I could probably turn him into a macaw or something. I don't know. Probably work with his beak and change it and maybe changes feathers. Or I could take him and make him just some wild color that he wouldn't be for me myself. Anybody that knows that's ever taken any of my classes knows that I'm not an artist. I do not know how to draw, but I know how to use the tools and illustrator to make it look like I can. So I started this and go great. Or I might have a nice you know, artist friend that says, here I made this for you and now I need to change. It makes a change to that as well. But the great thing is, I can see that these are all individual items. As I roll over it, you can see it's a pretty complex sort of thing. Do you have the patience for something like this? Yeah, I wouldn't be able to try. This either is beautiful, though. I love it. Sorry. Those are just some samples of what you can do in illustrator things. Also like you were talking about industrial design. Ah, lot of technical illustrations. Think of all what's everybody's favorite, You know, Swedish furniture store you know, if they all have those all the graphics and all the how to guides and put those together. Israel, I don't know. They are done an illustrator, but they most certainly could be. That is the the type of image that you would create in Illustrator as well. So just some samples for that. All right, so let's actually get started. How do we get started making all of this great stuff? The first thing we need to do is win to launch Illustrator and a couple things on because there was an announcement this week right in the middle of our creative suite, or Creative Cloud Week is there was an update to the creative cloud, and so I'm not sure how much anybody's talked about it in the last, because it's only it's only been two days, so there are. There's a new version of the creative cloud, APs, but the nice thing is, it loads them side by side. So I've had Illustrator CC and now what will notice is that we go out to the apse. It's actually Adobe Illustrator CC 2014 so it's all been amended. All the apse have been amended But the great thing is, when you load it, it loads it and keeps your other one as well. So if for some reason I get into something, I've been using this now for the whole three days, it's been out. But if for some reason it doesn't work, we may have to switch to the one that was out that came out in January. But that's been the great thing about the cloud is that it? Automatically just any time there's new features, you just download the new version. It's there. We don't have to wait 18 months for a new version, but this is kind of nice because it kept him side by side. I don't know how often that's going to happen that way, but it's kind of nice because I can see the new version, the new items that are there in the old stuff as well. So to open on document, assuming most people know how to launch an application, double click on the icon or launch it from the start menu were the doctor, whatever. When I get that, I get the illustrator environment, so I've got some panels open. We're going to talk about panels in just a little while. Anybody that uses any adobe product knows that they love their panels and panels is how we keep everything organized in the application. So I'm gonna create a new document. So we go up to the file menu, she's file new, and I get presented with the new document window, and I'm actually jump out for just a second. I didn't turn on my zoom tool, which I definitely want to make sure I have. Zoom it running here so we can zoom in and see things that are happening. And also can favorite mouse pose. I'm gonna come in here with my was Jose and open that as well. I don't know that I have my setting set correctly, but I'll I'll deal with that. But then this week at least zoom in and show you things as well. And because I'm really bad with keyboard shortcut and used to be commanded Z toe, open it in our options you to open and close that. So the first thing I get is a new document dialog box. Now, I know a lot of people skip over this part because they're just they just put a name and then they go. But you were talking about not knowing that you were wanting to know the settings and know everything that's there. And that's the thing that I think it's glossed over a lot is what all these buttons do. I don't know. Let's go over those. We're gonna talk about a couple of these. The first thing illustrator ask you is what's the name of your document? Sometimes I just leave that untitled So But since I accidentally put, you know, deleted what was there? I'll give it a name sometimes. I don't know. I don't even know what it is I'm making. I'm just gonna open up and start working on something. I could name it later, so it's no big deal. But a really important thing is what is the profile? This is something I'm gonna talk about a lot. Where is this job going? When you're done, if you don't know where you're going, how do you know how you're supposed to start going back to my no matting? If I didn't know where I was going first, how would I know what road to take out of my house? I suppose there are people that travel like that and that's okay. I don't want to do that when I'm creating documents because the worst thing and e I don't want to do it so much with illustrator Photo shopped, for sure and in design for sure. If you don't know where it's going when you're done, you start out wrong. They were started really low resolution and photo shop, and then you get told by someone is printing your stuff. I need a higher resolution and you're like, How do I add that you can't You have to start over. So knowing in the beginning where it's going is super important. So Adobe has put in different profiles that air in here. So where is it going? Print Web devices, which are kind of overlapping a basic RGB and video and film. I'm never gonna make anything of video film out of illustrate just me myself. Well, guess, never say never, but I don't have any plans for, but usually I'm gonna go to print or I'm going to go to Web or at least devices I may be making a PdF that's going to be read, say, on an IPad, right? So But a lot of times, I assume I'm probably gonna go to print as well. And I always tell people if you're going print and somewhere else, start with print because print is a little more constrictive, I guess you know, there's certain things you have to have. You have to have higher resolution images. You have to have the c m y que workspace, which is more constrained as well. RGB has a much larger color gamut. And so having the RG er the sound like a set up means you're already saying, Okay, I'm gonna work within the print confines. I can add things later for other other options, right? Somebody who had with print will say print and what I get when I get print is down here in the advanced, it says. Well, what what's the color mode? What's the raster effects? What's the resolution of that? You can leave those set as are you don't need to change those. I just want to show you that as you change. If I decided, let's go toe Web. My color modes changed RGB and my screen resolutions only 72 pp. I, which is something I would probably change just because I don't know anybody that actually has a 72 PP. I monitor anymore. I mean, everything's pretty high resolution. I've got the retina display. Or it's going to say, if I make something for the IPad those air already displays as well. Pretty high resolution. In fact, I've had retina display is nearly print resolution. So for me, I may make something in print and never dumb it down, as I like to say, just because it's going to go on a high resolution device that just having that extra resolution will work the other things that change. When I worked with print, I get on the size for my documents. I get things like Letter Tabloid and some European size. A 483 guys have got those sizes, those air print sizes, those air paper sizes. When I switch over to Web, you know, so changes to pixel measurements. They're not very high, as you can see. You know, we're doing it for the Web, but we want to do retina display. That's obviously not even high enough for that. If I turn over two devices, my choice is turning things like IPad air IPad, mini, the IPhone five s. So these air pretty No, of course this is just just came out a couple days ago, so of course it's got the five s. And, you know, in a week that will totally probably be wrong because an apple will come out with something. I like to call it the Apple Adobe leapfrog game because it's always there, always trying to keep up with each other. But the nice thing is, I have some of those pre built in. If I said great, I'm gonna work on a fire HD Kindle fire. I already have that. I don't have to go out and remember, What's the pixel dimensions of the fire, right? Well, again, this is current right now, who knows in three weeks what happens, right. So anyway, I get to choose the different modes. I'm gonna jump back to print, and I'm going to choose art boards. And we're going to talk about multiple art birds just a little while later. So think of art boards sort of as pages. They're not exactly, but they can be used that way again. If we're getting into multi page books were into a 48 page workbook. I'm not going to 48 individual art boards that I need to maintain an illustrator. I'm gonna lay those out in design, but it's great to have things like business card, letterhead, envelope all in the same document. So they're all there so I can maintain a look across all of them. I have the same colors to work with the same font, sir. Loaded. The same images are, say, logos are all there on all the different pieces, so I can choose how maney our boards. But often times I start with one because we could again add those later. And in that example of business card, letterhead and envelopes, those are all different sizes. I only get to choose one our board size when I start. So why make three of them and have to change them later? I can make them on the fly and set them to the size as I go along. Next thing it's gonna ask me is what's the width and height? Well, I chose letter, so that's width and height. But you notice that within high, it isn't very helpful to me. who works in Pike Ism points. I know some people do. I used to when I was in printing, but I don't anymore. But I can come over here to my units and shoes, inches, millimeters or centimeters, whatever we were working in. And I'm gonna tell you how to set this as a preference in a little while so I can go ahead and I'll set this for inches right now, and I can choose an orientation. Do I wanted to be portrait or landscape, and again, we can change this later. But the more we do right now, the less we have to change. Laters. We start working, and they were trying to manipulate it, later said that, and a bleed a bleed amount is how much we need our graphics or whatever background color to go off the page because we wanted to run to the edge of the page because you can print to the end of to the edge of a page, whether it's on an inkjet printer on printing press, you can't print to the edge. It makes things messy. When you're actually printing, you've actually got something going on paper, and if it hits the edge. It wraps around the back side makes a big, gooey mess. Right. So what we do is we print it on a larger sized piece of paper and we come back and trim it off. But you don't want your image to come right to the edge because any time you run anything through a machine, it doesn't go straight through the machine. You get what's called bounce, and it moves around. So you want to make sure your images. So if you want something to come to the edge, you need to set up a bleed. But then you need to make sure all your images go past to the bleed mark. So we'll actually put a bleed mark in here. I'm just gonna dio an eighth of an inch. And then what I'm gonna do is make sure that this little icon over here make all settings the same miss selected, so that when I hit Tab, it fills it in so I don't have to type point went to five and four places. I'm all about saving time, right? So I go ahead and put that in there, and then that will give me a bleed mark. So I remember to pull everything out to that size and again, we can change anything we want down here. I'm just gonna leave the settings that are here. But I do have other choices I could make. We don't have a lot of rest effects. I have three different, you know, us screen medium and high nights ago Did I can also choose to line objects to the pixel grid? If I'm working for the Web, I want things to line up to a pixel grid. Everything needs to be aligned via pixels so that we don't have half pixel showing up just makes a mess. That's I'm just gonna go ahead and say, OK, yes, that's pretty much creating a new document. And I always like to tell people that, you know, try things. Experiments? See what happens with one place. Don't do that in the new document dialog box. This is not to experiment, push buttons and see what happens. Really know what it is that's going to happen to your document when it leaves your hands, and so that when you're creating things, you know exactly what needs to actually go into that particular object that's there, so make sense. All right, Good. So now we've got a new a new ah document, and I just want to make sure of some of the things that we can do. We can do new we can also, instead of starting from scratch, because that's kind of overwhelming. Now we've just got this blank page staring us in the face. Now we have to actually put something on that page so we don't always have to start from scratch. Some new commander control end. Open up a new document and there's a little button down here that says templates. Now there's not a lot of great templates. They used to be a whole bunch. You can get some from other places if you want. They're places online. Deviant art is one of them. That a lot of people there is a marketplace. For that. There's tons of marketplaces. I would look up marketplaces for templates for adobe products and look under illustrator templates. And people may have made up, you know, business cards already. You're just gonna plop in your, you know, information your logo, but they've already set it all up, maybe on a page or they've done the coloring. They put in all the crop marks that are there. They've done a lot of the work for you. We have some blank ones that are built into the application. So I'm gonna come in. Here is this blank templates and let's say we want to go over here to the business card template mrs dot ai T. And the reason it's not a it is. That's an adobe illustrator template. But what happens with the template files when you open up a template file instead of opening it up and calling it business cards? And now I'm overriding it. And oops, I made a change and hit save, and now it's different. It's going to open up an untitled document. So when I hit Save, it's going to say, What do you want to save it, as it doesn't automatically overwrite it, So it's a new open that up. This is kind of there's a lot in here. There's different business. Card size is there's two up a swell, and there's four Oppa's Well, I've never I don't usually do business cards that way, but it could be a vertical business card But then I sing is I can either do single ones or I can use the four up if that's what my printer wants. It depends on, you know, in my printing, them myself and my sending them to an online printing service where they usually want a single one into Pdf. You know, it's there. No bleeds in this, So we're gonna go ahead and have to change the bleeds. We can always go back and make changes. Like I said to the file, I could come back here to document set up under the file menu, and I come in and change that bleed. So I go ahead and give bleeds. That's gonna get bleeds to every art board that I have on that page and it didn't shop. Why do we not have bleeds? All right, I'm gonna bring this back in anyway. Let's see if I can get a bleed. If not, I'm going to skip it again. I am working with a brand new version of Illustrator. So my bleeds air not showing appear at all. That's right. We're gonna leave that I should be able to see my bleeds like I have there. That little red line that's around and you know it was red. But now it's sort of turning black hair. That should be read that showing up that way on the screen, the weird redraw issue. But that's what that is. That's the bleed mark. There almost always read because lead to see There's my red, Just a strange redraw issue. So anyway, what? We want to make sure we have those bleeds set up. But I can use a template. So somebody else has already done that work. They've even put the crop marks in there. So don't feel like you have to start from scratch. Use a template that's there. Now, if you have made one that you like, you've done all that work, save it out as a template. All right, so we actually will just do that. We can say save as and then I see is when I open to that, you know, sit noted. It opened up an untitled document so that when I hit save, I get save happy Initiate command s. It doesn't automatically overwrite whatever was there. It says it was a template before you must be wanting to make an illustrator file. That's what he gave us here. Or I can choose to do an illustrator template as well. So I could say this is a brand new template, so I could start with a template and save it also as a template. So I do. That saves it to an ai t. I would give it a name. And then when I opened that up, it also becomes a new untitled document, right? So that's something I do. So why reinvent the wheel? That's what I tell people all the time is that you can't be the first person that ever needed to do this. Go out and find the resource is do that. I think, really, I can't be the only one that ever had to make this before. So close the backup back to original file. Some of the things we can do is that you can start with our work that you're allowed to manipulate. So, for instance, like I said, I got a lot of my files that are here. I got my sample files from actual. Let's go into my relax. My butterfly ones don't open my butterfly pictures here and these air just four images that I grabbed again from photo Leah so downloaded from there. And it's, you know, one of the paid services. There are a lot of other stock photography, and then if and most of them have it on option toe look, just vectors. So if you're working with Illustrator, don't be looking through all those photos, because then you find the one you love and they realized it's a raster image and you can't use it. So go ahead and grab one that you know that you really like. And then we can start making manipulations to it. So these air four different items I just copied each one and paste it into this one document here. So again, I might start with that. And if the licenses allowed and that's a whole nother class, probably on licensing and all that. But if the licence says that you are allowed to use it for commercial use and also that you're allowed to manipulate it, why not? I mean, if somebody has a butterfly here and I need to make changes, but I don't even know how to start drawing because we've all determined I can't draw. So it is a great I like this butterfly, but I don't like the colors. I don't like his shape. I'm gonna change it all. I can start with one and make changes from there again. Don't reinvent the wheel on them, and then we can do things. We can add items. So just for fun, I'm gonna show you something I've added, you know, because it looked like I had a little specimen here, so I just went ahead and pin to the mall, to the board. I like that. I was probably cruel of me, but I went ahead and stuck little pins on there. So again, I just took my little butterfly collection and then suddenly made it like a real butterfly collection. All right, So again, don't start from don't start completely from scratch every time. And the other thing we could do is we can take, like, an image of a photo or a sketch or something along those lines. And I don't actually have one here sketch image. But a lot of times you might have sketched something yourself and you scan it and want to use that. And that's actually something I covered in the essentials class is how to take a drawing or a photo and use it and build on top of that. So that's one of my hacks. A lot of people I know, thank me for that class and said it. One gal said, It's okay, Erica said It made me feel okay to be a hack. You know, I'm a designer and a hack because I don't draw. And so I felt much better about that, and that's what I do. I mean says I can't you know, I can't see. I drew the cowboy. There's a couple I'm like I can see a cowboy in my head but I can't get it onto the page. Use it as a base for our work to start drawing shapes on top of we're gonna do a lot with drawing shapes and a little while a swell. But we won't be doing tracing on top of the their work