Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

becomes all too apparent, even to people who have no idea what a

pixel is. (The fact that most moderately educated people do know

what pixels are and can identify low-resolution imagery at a glance

makes matters that much worse.)

In contrast, vector-based graphics—even poorly rendered ones—

are output at the maximum resolution of a printer. The result is

uniformly smooth artwork with clearly defi ned edges and sharp,

exacting corners. And because each line or shape is a separate ob-

ject, you can pick it up and move or modify it at a moment’s no-

tice, whether you bothered to place it on an independent layer (as

is necessary in Photoshop) or not.

A document created in Illustrator is called a drawing or an illus-

tration. You can also call it a graphic or a design, depending on

its content. A fi le from Photoshop is a photograph or a bitmapped

image. For purposes of this book, the term image will always mean

a piece of artwork that comprises pixels. I’m much more lax about

my vector nomenclature. Illustrator is mostly about vectors, but it

lets you import and integrate images into your vector artwork as

well. So any word that’s synonymous with graphic art will and does

suffi ce in this book.

Opening an Illustration

Opening a drawing in Illustrator is pretty much like

opening a document in any application, Adobe or oth-

erwise. It all begins with the Open command. In this

exercise, I’ll show the basic method of opening a fi le. In

the next, we’ll see a different (and arguably better) way.

1.

Bring up the Open a File dialog box. Choose

File→Open from the menu bar. Or you can press

Ctrl+O (-O on the Mac). You get the Open a File

dialog box. Figure 1-4 shows the dialog box as it ap-

pears on the Mac under OS X Snow Leopard (10.6),

where it is simply called the Open dialog box.

2.

Navigate to the Lesson 01 folder. Assuming

you installed the lesson fi les on your desk-

top, here’s how to get to the Lesson 01 folder:

•

Click the desktop icon located along the left side

of the dialog box to display the fi les and folders

on your computer’s desktop. (If you don’t see a

desktop icon on the Mac, press -D.)

Figure 1-4 .

P E A R L O F W I S D O M

When you fi rst launch Illustrator, you’ll get the

infamous welcome screen, just as you do the fi rst

time you open any Creative Suite application. In

the past, you were probably justifi ed in getting

rid of it as fast as you could turn off the Show

This Dialog at Startup check box. But the CS5

welcome screen (like CS4 before it) is moderately

useful, so you might want to spend a few minutes

inspecting its options, which I cover in the video

lesson. You get not only a handy list of recently

opened fi les and new document types but also

links to some helpful resources. If these seem

like options you’ll use, great; if not, turn on

the Don’t Show Again check box to dismiss the

screen forever. (And it’s not really forever forever;

you can revisit the screen any time you like by

choosing Help→Welcome Screen.)

7

Opening an Illustration