Adobe Illustrator Videos - Blog Posting

What is Illustrator?
There are two types of graphics: Vector graphics can be scaled up or down without losing quality while Raster graphics are a fixed size and will lose quality when scaled up.

How to create a new document
Go to Windows --> Properties --> Edit Artboards
You can have multiple Artboards open in one document

Work with artboards
The Artboards button on the right side shows the different Artboards in a document, the Artboards button to the left allows you to click and scale Artboards or even create a new one. The Artboards Options button on the top allows you to scale the size of an Artboard precisely.

Draw, edit, and re-edit shapes easily
All shapes can be controlled by the points around them using the selection tool or you can edit them more precisely by going to Shape in the Control Panel. From this control panel board you can scale the object, rotate the object, round the edges, etc.

Use Brushes
If you go to the brushes panel and click in the top right corner you can open the brushes library. There are a lot more options in the brushes library.

Apply colors
"D" key returns you to the default white fill with black outline. There are so many different ways to adjust color. If you double click on the color menu on the left panel it will bring up the color picker.

Create text
If adding text over an object do not click the object...hide or lock it.

Transform artwork
If you go to View you can hide the bounding box on an object. The free transform also allows you to distort the perspective of an object.

Understanding the Control panel
The control panel changes so that you can adjust whatever object you currently have selected. It goes from the most important things you can adjust to the left to the lesser important to the right.

View artwork
If the piece of art that you've created is bigger than a standard size paper that your would print you can break the image up into tiles. To create tiles go to View --> Show print tiling.

Organize content with layers
The layers work the same way in Illustrator as they do in Photoshop. They help you stay organized.