Chapter One. Getting Started

Adobe Illustrator CS3 is an amazing, powerful, and truly fun program. Illustrator is essential for projects ranging from technical illustration to poster design. Book covers, architectural renderings, and anatomical illustrations (such as the bone structure or circulatory system charts you see at the doctor’s office) are done almost exclusively with Illustrator. Illustrator is the preferred tool for logo and packaging design. It dominates map drawing, and a good percentage of CD covers are designed with Illustrator.

Illustrator’s vector-based artwork differs in many ways from the bitmap or raster-based artwork that is the specialty of Photoshop. Vector-based artwork is scalable; that is, it can be resized without ...

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