Tutorial Purpose

This tutorial covers some of the most immediately useful tools and functions of Adobe Illustrator.

Illustrator has been around for a long time, and it has way too many features. This tutorial covers a very small number of them. If you want to know more about anything not covered in this document, please speak to the staff!

Getting Started

Basic info

Original image here. Licensed under CC 2.5

Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based graphics application. That means that instead of storing image data as a “bitmap” grid of differently colored pixels (like Photoshop), Illustrator graphics are described mathematically as a series of points, lines, and curves.

A bitmap image is sometimes referred to as a raster image. Both words mean the same thing.

Vector graphics have a few advantages:

• vector graphic files tend to be much smaller than comparable bitmap images
• vectors are resolution-independent; can be scaled up infinitely without becoming jaggy
• because objects are described only by math, it’s easy to make extremely precise graphics

They can also be a pain:

• because everything is a path (a graphical representation of math), things that are easy to do in a bitmap paint program like Photoshop are sometimes overly complicated in Illustrator
• every path sits on its own layer, so every single object is behind something and in front of something else (except for the ones at the very bottom and top). This can make it hard to select the right object, or to see what you’re doing.
• Illustrator graphics tend to look computer-ish. It’s almost impossible to create artwork in Illustrator that is natural-looking. Use Photoshop for that.

Set your prefs & workspace environment:

• Launch Adobe Illustrator CC
• Go to Preferences → Units
  • Set [General: Inches] or metric if you prefer
• Set palette visibility in Windows menu:
  • show Control bar
  • show: Align, Layers, Stroke, Transform