Adobe Illustrator allows you to create complex illustrations and type effects.

You can extend the vector and type capabilities of image manipulation and page layout programs to produce work that is not resolution dependent.

This new one-day course begins with an overview of how the program works and then uses exercises to show you how to get the most out of it.

The first exercise will show you how logos and illustrations are drawn and manipulated.

In the afternoon session, you’ll apply your new skills to another exercise, which involves drawing a map and adapting a logo.

During the course you will learn how to:
 

• draw simple and complex shapes with the shape tools and the pen and the pencil tool
• fill shapes with flat colour, gradients and patterns
• draw outlines to shapes
• select and change the scale and rotation of shapes
• duplicate and move shapes
• alter the weight and style of lines
• use the type tool.

Programme

• User interface for the software
  • Working spaces
  • Tool bar
  • Using layers effectively
• Basic drawing skills
  • Pen and pencil tools
  • Line / stroke
  • Shape tools and compound paths
  • Colour
  • Fill with solid colour and fill with pattern
  • Select and repeat
  • Transform
• Vector and Bitmap images
  • Essentials of vector images
  • Essentials of bitmap images
  • Using Live Trace to convert bitmap images into vector graphics
• Graphics and type
  • Creating type
  • Paragraph typography
  • Type as an outline / object
  • Transforming type
  • Type on a line
• Saving, printing and file formats

Who will benefit from this course?
Marketing and design personnel who need to understand how logos are used in print, who organise any function that needs clear charts and location maps, who need to combine image and text for advertising that can be successfully rescaled. The course assumes little or no experience with Illustrator.

Note: This course is taught using Adobe CS 3.

Your tutor
Meg Richardson is a freelance graphic designer, typographer and trainer who has worked for a wide range of clients, designing and illustrating anything from small booklets to large academic volumes. Meg has been a visiting lecturer at Oxford Brookes University School of Art, Music and Publishing since 2000.

Note that most of our open courses can also be run as in company events.

Send details of this course to a colleague.

Dates: 7 October 2008

Price: £349+VAT (a number of discounts are available).

Venue: The Publishing Training Centre in Wandsworth, London (see a map and a list of local hotels).

Make a provisional booking on an Illustrator 1