Part 8: Final Thoughts on Illustrator

In this eighth and final part of our Illustrator guide, we share some final thoughts on the software for the purpose of wrapping things up.

In the previous part of our guide, we discussed effects and calligraphy. Now, we wrap things up with some final thoughts on the software.

Uses for Illustrator

The thing with Illustrator is that there are many uses for the software. Primarily, it designs, but what you are designing can range. For instance, you can make a magazine cover logo with Illustrator. Alternatively, you can make print designs. In fact, you can generate logo’s for online purposes. Regardless, there is a lot of uses with this.

You do have to keep in mind that if you are designing something, you have to be aware of limitations with it. For instance, say I’m designing a logo for a company. You might want to keep things simple. For instance, if you are designing a logo to be imprinted on rubber, you’ll actually want to stay away from special effects and colours. In fact, you’ll ideally want to use black any white. That way, it is easy to make the rubber stamp.

Alternatively, let’s say you are designing something for colour print media. Chances are, you’ll not only want to print off a copy of that design to see what it looks like on paper, but use a higher quality printer while you are at it. The reason for this is that you might be able to design something that has a cool bright colour on it. When you print it off, however, it might not look quite the same on the page. Using CMYK colours can help with this. Unfortunately, colours on screen have a light behind it. Paper generally doesn’t have that. So, you may see some differences between what you see on the screen and what you see in print.

Also, keep in mind pixel size. Some of the defaults in Illustrator set you to 72DPI or screen resolution. This might be fine for online website images, but you may want to bump up the resolution for other mediums. Otherwise, you may get stuck with badly pixelated designs.

Transferring Data from Illustrator

One cool aspect about Illustrator is the fact that it can communicate with other pieces of software within the creative suite. For instance, let’s say you create a really cool logo in Illustrator. You can actually copy that logo from Illustrator and paste it into Photoshop. Alternatively, there is the Adobe Bridge program that can help these two pieces of software communicate with each other. So, if you have knowledge in multiple pieces of software, you can actually make your efforts a multi-software effort.

Either way, you should keep in mind how well these pieces of software can communicate with each other. If you do, you can maximize the power of Illustrator and other programs as well.

Final Word

For me, Illustrator is actually a fantastic starting point whenever I want to use the Creative Suite. I can design logo’s and other pieces of art quite easily. From there, I can always transfer it onto Photoshop or Dreamweaver to name two possibilities. It’s great for creating initial building blocks of a much larger 2D art project. If you can afford this software and want to get into this type of art, this is a great place to start learning.

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