What is Adobe Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator can help any business or user create marketing and advertising tools to promote their business or product. Marketing and advertising can differentiate you from other businesses and Adobe Illustrator can assist you with this. This article will tell you everything you need to know about Adobe Illustrator. We will discuss what techniques Illustrator offers, what you can do with it, new features, and what Illustrator will cost you.

What is Adobe Illustrator Used For?

How you market and advertise your company is very important. It draws prospective customers and clients in. Many graphic designers and professionals use Adobe Illustrator for their businesses or own personal use.

Vector Art

One of the most popular tools Adobe Illustrator is used for is vector graphics. Vector graphics allows you to make artwork or logos into any size you want without losing resolution.

They are great for small businesses who want to make different shapes in sizes of their logos, make stickers to put on their products or for poster designs to even billboards.

Typography Font Design

Are you tired of using the same font? And you want to create your own custom font? Adobe Illustrator allows you to do that. In Illustrator, you can draw freehand or you can import your own hand lettering. Adobe gives you instructions on how to do so on their website.

Icon Design

Need to design an icon for your website? Adobe Illustrator is here to help! Illustrator allows you to sketch your designs on paper and import them to illustrator. To spruce up your icon you can stack and combine vector shapes. You want to add some color? In Illustrator, you can apply color and adjust the opacity to make the perfect icon.

Infographic Design

In this article, we discuss how you can use Adobe Illustrator to create marketing and advertising tools to promote a business, brand, or product. However, you can also use Illustrator to organize data by making pie charts and graphs. In illustrator you can make creative charts and graphs you couldn’t make Excel or any other software. Illustrator allows you to make eye-catching graphs, pie charts, and flowcharts by adding illustrations and icons. Charts and graphs in Illustrator can be easily updated as well. With the charts tool, you can adjust information and data points without having to redo your artwork.

Adobe Illustrator Tutorials

Adobe Illustrator is a software application that is fairly easy to use. There are many free tutorials on Adobe’s website for how to do many techniques, from how to create shapes, create drawing tools, and adding images and artistic effects. These tutorials are videos ranging from 11 to 30 minutes. Not only does Adobe Illustrator offer videos to educate customers how to use their software for beginners and experienced users, but many other platforms have videos on how to use and advance your skills with Adobe Illustrator. Skillshare and YouTube offer a variety of tutorials on how to learn or advance your skills with Adobe Illustrator as well.

Free Tutorials Adobe Illustrator Offers:

Add text to your designs

Create with drawing tools

Design with color

Create with shapes

Design with opacity and blending modes

Create and apply a pattern

What Can You Do with Adobe Illustrator?

There are many things you do with the Adobe Illustrator, and the options are endless. It allows businesses and users to create their own graphics and advertising. Adobe allows you to make your own logos. Abode gives you the option of creating these logos into vector graphics which allows you to make it as small or large as you want with losing resolution. You can also make your own personal business cards with Illustrator and make them any size and shape you want. Adobe Illustrator even allows you to create email signatures that can allow customers or colleagues to click on your signatures that immediately redirect them to your personal websites or social media accounts. The list goes on and on, to even shirts for your business with customs designs.

Designing a Social Media Banner

Social media banners can be used for your companies LinkedIn, Twitter, YouTube or your Facebook page. Your social profile is important in driving sales and establishing your brand.

Follow these steps on how to create a social media banner for your business or your own personal brand:

Add your own photo, choose file > place, and then click to drag to add the image. Then you will right-click and choose Arrange > and send it back to reveal a text if you choose to have one. Next, add your own logo to personalize your banner. Add a customized text and design. Select each line with the type tool and replace it with your own text and make it your own by changing the font and style. Lastly, upload to your social media pages and reflect your brand!

Designing a Logo

Your logo will be the first thing that comes to mind to a customer when thinking of your brand or your company. When you think of McDonald’s, what comes to mind? The golden arches. It is important to design a logo that represents you or your product perfectly.

Create a doc and bring an image related to what you are trying to create to compare it to. Use different shapes that are available to build your logo. Apply colors to your logo using the controls Adobe offers that allow you to make edits. Now adjust and scale your logo to the way you want. Add your brand or company’s name to your logo. Save your logo!

Add Text to Your Designs

Before making any logos, or social media banners you need to learn how to add text to your designs. Add texts to your designs in really simple and you just have to follow a few steps.

Add a line of text: In Adobe Illustrator, select the type tool in the tools panel, click to add a placeholder text to your document. This kind of placeholder text is a point type, added to a doc in a specific location. Next, select the selection tool in the tools panels. This will create a box around your text, called a text object. Lastly, drag the text to reposition it. Add paragraphs of text: With now using the type tool, drag it in the doc window to add new text to the document. With the placeholder text selected, you can type in the text object. Format text: When selecting a font in the font family menu, you can click more to find different fonts. When you find a font you like click Activate to sync and the font you pick will sync to your computer. If you want to change the color of your text click the fill color in the properties panel and choose a color.

There are many other Adobe Illustrators that allow you to create and the list goes on and on. Other things you can do with Adobe Illustrator:

Design a social media banner

Create sticker art

Create color gradients

Custom drop cap

Create hand lettering

Create color swatches and tints

Using Adobe Illustrator on Your iPad

Adobe now offers illustrator on your iPad. Users can do things on their iPad instead of using their PC or Mac.

Using Adobe Illustrator on your iPad allows you to design logos, graphics and many more from on the go. Using illustrator on your iPad allows you to utilize your Apple Pencil to draw whatever you want with ease and change tools with just a tap.

Since Illustrator on the iPad is fairly new, these are some of the features illustrator offers:

Optimized for Apple Pencil

Patterns in a touch

Typography toolkit

Ability to create symmetry patterns

How Much Will Adobe Illustrator Cost You?

Interested in getting Adobe Illustrator for your business or own personal use? Here is the breakdown of what Adobe Illustrator will cost you.

Adobe offers 3 different plans to choose from. The annual plan that is prepaid that costs $239.88 a year that equals to $19.99 a month. They also offer another option for an annual plan that you can pay monthly. This plan costs $251.88 a year that you will pay $20.99 monthly and an early cancellation fee will apply. If you do not want to commit to an annual plan then you can opt for the monthly plan that will cost you 31.49 a month. If you are interested in Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere Pro, XD, and Acrobat DC as well, Adobe offers a monthly plan of $52.99 a month that offers access to all their services including Illustrator.

Adobe Illustrators includes many features for you to use. Create and combine shapes, Design logos, add effects to your artwork, trace and recolor photos and many more features. Illustrator updates automatically giving you new updates and releases.

If you are in need of any assistance with using Adobe Illustrator, reach out to SEO Design Chicago to get help from the experts who can help you use the features and tools of Adobe Illustrator.

FAQs about Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator for Beginners

246246

Upvote

This video is an Adobe Illustrator beginners tutorial.

Get a hold of your Adobe Illustrator skills by starting with mastering the Illustrator basics, and then learning to create effects, patterns, and more. This free Adobe Illustrator for beginners video is aimed at helping beginners learn how to use Adobe Illustrator easily and quickly. You don’t need any previous knowledge of the software, and you don’t need design or illustration skills.

This video starts from the beginning and works its way through each topic step by step. If you’ve never opened Illustrator before—or maybe you’ve opened it and struggled—this course is for you! By the end, you’ll know how to draw in Adobe Illustrator, how to make a pattern in Illustrator, and so much more.

Should I learn Photoshop or Illustrator first?

Deciding On Which Application To Learn first, Photoshop Or Illustrator?

Photoshop & Illustrator are common application for graphics design & other things, learning any of them cannot just give you a boost in graphics design. But it can look good in your resume. Deciding on which one of the two you want to work on depends on what you want to create the most.

So, What’s The Difference Between Photoshop & Illustrator?

The main difference between Photoshop & Illustrator is the kind of graphics each application creates, Photoshop creates raster graphics, while Illustrator creates vector. In case you don’t know what that means, don’t worry, as I will talk about them right away.

What Is Raster Graphics

Raster graphics is the kind of graphics where the image is created by having small squares, called pixels, arranged side by side. The computer memorized the arrangement of these pixels & uses that to display the picture. Like this:-

Raster graphics has one key disadvantage, since the pixels are memorized by the computer, it can’t be enlarged without losing some of the quality. There are many techniques where the computer try to produce additional pixels to create a bigger picture, but there’s a great limit to how much you could resize the picture without losing much quality. So having a large enough picture from the beginning, either by drawing on a big canvas, or to by taking picture with a camera with high resolution is a must. It is not uncommon to have pictures larger than what you need too.

As I previously said, Photoshop is mainly made for creating & editing raster graphics.

Okay, What About Vector Graphics?

On the other hand, Vector graphics are created using mathematical equations. If you have a line drawn that way, every time the application displays the line, it redraws the line from scratch using the equation it has in memory. This gives vector graphics a huge advantage over raster, no matter how you zoom in or enlarge the picture, and no matter how large the paper you want to print the image on is, vector graphics will never fail you here.

Here’s how an image would look like in case it was zoomed in both raster & vector graphics:-

Since the equation of the object (the line in this case) is simple & short, vector graphics tend to take much less space compared to raster graphics.

That being said, you may be thinking that vector graphics should be used all the way. That may be the case in some cases. But vector graphics has some disadvantages too, like how you can’t use it to create complex images.

You should learn Illustrator in case you want to create vector graphics.

And Finally

Both Photoshop or Illustrator have the capability of the other one. Photoshop can create paths, which are vectors, while Illustrator can have raster objects that can’t be resized. But it is totally better to use each application for their intended use, rather than use one for everything.

I hope this post made it easier to you to chose whether you should learn Photoshop or Illustrator. :>

In case you are looking for a good Photoshop books, check out my book Learn Photoshop CC with pictures, which is an easy way to learn Photoshop, it is written with tons of examples & detailed instructions for many of the common tools & concepts in the program. Use the code MiniTutorial to get 20% off the PDF version’s full price, with 30 days money-back guarantee. The book is also available for Kindle as well

See Also:-