And third, once you get a feeling for how Illustrator worksas
well as how it doesnt—something about it is positively addictive.
The program has been compared to a Swiss Army knife due to its
versatility and functionality. But it’s more like a collection of tools
held up to a looking-glass with something more wonderful refl ected
back. The strangeness of Illustrator and the promise of still more just
beyond the next doorway is a large part of the programs attraction.
Embracing the twisted logic that permeates the program requires
a determined psychological commitment. When you come to the
bottle labeled “Drink me,you would do well to drink it (it is not
marked “Poisonafter all), every last drop. When you do, when you
chase every last word of this book as it leads you down the rabbit-
hole into the very deep well and beyond, your view of sense and
nonsense may well shift a few degrees. Its not that you’ll suddenly
decide that Illustrator is reasonable and the other applications are
un. That would be madness! It’s just that regular logicactual,
quanti able, incontrovertible, commonsense logicseems awfully
mundane compared with the Mad Hatter logic of Illustrator. Lewis
Carrolls dormouse never actually said Feed your head(or any-
thing of the sort!), but nothing can prevent Illustrator from doing
just that. And once you get a headful of this vast Jabberwocky of a
program, it’s hard to return to a normal program without feeling a
tiny sense of loss. As Alice herself said, Somehow it seems to ll
my head with ideasonly I dont exactly know what they are.
What Is Illustrator?
Illustrator is at its heart a drawing program. This means it excels at
the creation of graphic art that involves smooth lines, bold colors,
and crisp text. The simplest real-world analogy is a coloring book.
As you may recall from the dim, dopey days of childhood, life in
a coloring book is simple, an impossible cardboard-cutout world
distilled to its most primitive components, as in Figure 1-2. Each
detail is plotted out with straight lines and curves, all of which
intersect to describe an array of codependent shapes. As a young
coloring-book artist, it was your job to ll those careless shapes with
colors, usually continuous hues applied with crayon or marker but
sometimes a more variedthat is to say, messy—blend from one
color to another. This blend of predefi ned lines and colored spaces
made up the fi nished illustration.
But a coloring book is hardly the only real-world analogy. Any tra-
ditional pen-and-ink graphic, schematic pencil drawing, stylized
type treatment, or high-contrast painting falls to Illustrator’s digi-
Figure 1-2 .
5
What Is Illustrator?

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