Our Favourite Ways to Use Adobe Illustrator

This start-up guide is intended to help new users get to grips with the way that they use this design software. Illustrator is an incredibly powerful program and when you first start looking around you might feel overwhelmed by all of its functions and working tools.

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Company reports and brochures

Illustrator is the perfect software to help you put together brochures and annual reports for your company. You can create styles, save them, and apply them to title, subheadings, and paragraphs, to allow you to quickly make changes across the whole document. The intelligent text boxes within Illustrator allow you to easily move your text around your documents. You can also insert picture objects within your text that nestle in your text and you can also choose how the text reacts to the object.

Comic book art

For all budding comic book artists and illustrators, Illustrator helps you to convert your pen and ink artwork into editable vector artwork. From here on, once you have a vector drawing, the world really is your oyster. Edit the line thickness and style, apply colour schemes and swatches, and place your story panel into a neat framework. There really isn't much you can't do.

Social media experts

When you want to create a distinctive visual identity for your community, you can turn to Illustrator to create stunning banners, buttons, icons, and graphics for your page. The ability to save styles and preferences within Illustrator, alongside all of the smart guides, means that creating a contemporary and exciting brand identity is a cinch. You can start off by creating a logo or even designing your own font style. Next, search the web for pre-created templates by designers who have made it easy for you to create your own Facebook timeline cover or Twitter banner.

Typographers

If you've always had an interest in graphic design, and in particular typography, then Illustrator is the industry-standard tool you need to know. Illustrator allows you to perform minute adjustments to text such as kerning. This is the art of defining the distance between individual letters in a piece of text. The font is not perfect for every task. Sometimes, as you increase the font size (to fit into a large banner for example), the distance between the letters obviously needs adjustment. Use the kerning tool to set this to your own preference. These adjustments are usually made by eye.

We hope you found these tips helpful. When learning a new piece of software, the initial learning curve can seem incredibly steep. That's why it's important to read any literature you can get your hands on that will help you unlock all of its potential before you get frustrated and give up. Don't be afraid to refer to online training videos posted by Adobe, Lynda, and other publishers on YouTube. You can also pick up the official training books and buy magazines, which feature tutorials on how to get professional results. Source: www.visopix.com