Adobe® CS4 Web Workflows: Building Web Sites With Adobe® Creative Suite® 4

Part V. ILLUSTRATOR TO PHOTOSHOP TO FLASH TO DREAMWEAVER

Chapter 11 CRAFTING A FLEXIBLE MARKETING AREA PG. 314

Chapter 12 ANIMATING PHOTOSHOP GRAPHICS IN FLASH PG. 340

By and large, the Web is a bitmap-based medium. With the exception of emerging technologies such as the Canvas tag in HTML 5.0, you can't render vector graphics online without using a plug-in, such as the Adobe Flash Player. Nonetheless, the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web has all the components necessary to carry out a workflow that is vector-based rather than bitmap: Illustrator, Photoshop, and Flash with Dreamweaver as the final delivery mechanism.

Illustration—whether using pen and ink on a drawing pad or vectors on a computer screen—is truly a fine art, and Illustrator is the prime computer software medium for expressing that art. Illustrator contains a well-honed palette of tools for creating artwork composed of strokes, fills, anchor points, and paths. Because vector art work is really a description of a design—for example, a downward diagonal line might be written as "plot the starting point at 0,0 and draw to 100, 100"—rather than a series of precisely placed colored pixels, it is resolution independent. This quality of ...