Illustrator CS3: Introduction for Beginners (1 day)

Course Overview

This course provides the tools and methods required to manipulate images, text and graphics. Working with scanned images or designing from scratch this course will provide a fresh innovative approach to creativity and a thorough & professional introduction to Illustrator.

Audience

The course is suitable for any user requiring a good knowledge of Illustrator. All delegates must have basic Mac or Windows experience. The course is not designed to teach delegates the aspects of design graphics and techniques. Delegates wishing to learn more on the design and creativity should investigate the various courses available.

Course Outline

Every effort will be made to complete the agenda within the given time scale, but it should be noted that the course is designed to run at your pace and topics will not be rushed in order to complete the agenda.

The Illustrator Interface

• Exploring panels and workspaces
• Using the Control Panel
• Navigation
• Smart Guides
• Preview Options
• Grids and Guides
• Libraries

Drawing and Selection Essentials

• Draw Paths with the Pen Tool
• Shape Tools
• The Seletion Tools
• Mastering the Pen & Pencil Tools

Path Editing -

• Editing Anchor Points
• Compound Shapes
• Pathfinder Options
• Eraser tool
• Manipulating and Editing Paths
• Outlining Strokes
• Path Options

Working with Groups and Layers

• Defining & Editing groups
• Working with layers
• Layers and object hierarchy

Working with Colour

• Defining swatches
• Creating swatch groups and libraries
• Working with gradients & patterns
• Using the Color Guide -
• Live Colour
• Modifying color in artwork

Object Transformation and Positioning

• Moving,copying, rotating & scaling objects
• Reflecting and skewing objects
• Using the Free Transform tool
• Using the Transform panel
• Repeating transformations
• Using the Transform Each function
• Aligning & distributing objects

Brushes

• Creating a calligraphic, scatter, art & pattern brushes

Creating Simple Shapes

• Create a New Document
• Customize the Workspace
• Draw Basic Shapes Draw Basic Freeform Shapes with the Pencil Tool

Basic Text Editing

• Text Formatting
• Creating Text Threads
• Text on a Path
• Checking spelling
• Using the Change Case function
• Convert Text to Outlines

Creating Blends

• Creating a basic blend
• Using a blend to create an airbrush effect

Working with Images

• Placing images
• Using the Links panel
• The Edit Original workflow
• Live Trace
• Rasterizing artwork

Specialised Tasks

• Creating graphs
• Using Gradient Mesh
• Using Envelope Warps
• The Liquify Distortion tools

Organizing Assets with Adobe(R) Bridge

• Customize the Adobe Bridge Workspace
• Append Metadata to Assets

Illustrator CS3: Introduction for Beginners (1 day) / AILCS3-11