Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

And third, once you get a feeling for how Illustrator works—as

well as how it doesn’t—something about it is positively addictive.

The program has been compared to a Swiss Army knife due to its

versatility and functionality. But it’s more like a collection of tools

held up to a looking-glass with something more wonderful refl ected

back. The strangeness of Illustrator and the promise of still more just

beyond the next doorway is a large part of the program’s attraction.

Embracing the twisted logic that permeates the program requires

a determined psychological commitment. When you come to the

bottle labeled “Drink me,” you would do well to drink it (it is not

marked “Poison” after all), every last drop. When you do, when you

chase every last word of this book as it leads you down the rabbit-

hole into the very deep well and beyond, your view of sense and

nonsense may well shift a few degrees. It’s not that you’ll suddenly

decide that Illustrator is reasonable and the other applications are

un. That would be madness! It’s just that regular logic—actual,

quantifi able, incontrovertible, commonsense logic—seems awfully

mundane compared with the Mad Hatter logic of Illustrator. Lewis

Carroll’s dormouse never actually said “Feed your head” (or any-

thing of the sort!), but nothing can prevent Illustrator from doing

just that. And once you get a headful of this vast Jabberwocky of a

progra ...