Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

tal domain. And lest you think such artwork is rare or

refi ned, think again. We all see Illustrator artwork on

a daily basis. Just about every corporate logo in use

today has passed through Illustrator. Nearly every bag,

carton, or container you see at the grocery store comes

to you from Illustrator. Buying a new toy, computer, or

piece of sporting equipment? That box was most likely

designed in Illustrator. Movie posters, glossy magazine

ads, schoolbook illustrations, architectural renderings,

stamps, decals, DVD and CD cases, billboards, transit

signs, retail signage, bumper stickers, credit cards, gift

certifi cates, crap you get from McDonald’s, fragments

of screaming paper and colorful plastic buried in land-

fi lls the world over—in short, virtually every ounce of

still, single-page graphic commerce and public-service

labeling is to some extent a by-product of Illustrator

(see Figure 1-3). For better or for worse, Illustrator art-

work surrounds you.

Illustration versus Image

Illustrator’s main purpose is to create line art. Each

line, shape, and character of text is independent of its

neighbors. These independent elements are known as

objects. Illustrator describes each object using a basic

coordinate-based mathematical equation. (Fortunately,

Illustrator doesn’t assail you with this math; it calculates the

equations in the background.) Because these equations describe

the course and contours of the object, they are sometimes called

vectors. Hence, Illustrator is said to be an object-oriented or vector-

based drawing application. Illustrator prints the lines, shapes, and

text by sending the vectors to a printer and letting (or helping) the

printer sort out the details.

Compare this approach to that employed by the more popular

Photoshop, which brokers in tiny colored pixels. Each pixel is a

perfect square, arranged adjacent to its neighbors like squares on a

checkerboard. The purpose of most of Photoshop’s vast collection

of functions is to adjust the colors of these pixels.

That’s great for digital photographs and continuous-tone artwork,

in which one color gradually transitions into another. But it also

means that Photoshop imagery is resolution-dependent. An image

contains a fi nite number of pixels. Print the image too large, and

the jagged transitions between one block of pixels and the next

Figure 1-3 .

Original antenna artwork from Ryan Burke;

original cantina artwork from Jozz.

Both from iStockphoto.com.

6

Lesson 1: Starting a Document