Adobe Illustrator CS5 One-on-One

becomes all too apparent, even to people who have no idea what a

pixel is. (The fact that most moderately educated people do know

what pixels are and can identify low-resolution imagery at a glance

makes matters that much worse.)

In contrast, vector-based graphics—even poorly rendered ones—

are output at the maximum resolution of a printer. The result is

uniformly smooth artwork with clearly defi ned edges and sharp,

exacting corners. And because each line or shape is a separate ob-

ject, you can pick it up and move or modify it at a moment’s no-

tice, whether you bothered to place it on an independent layer (as

is necessary in Photoshop) or not.

A document created in Illustrator is called a drawing or an illus-

tration. You can also call it a graphic or a design, depending on

its content. A fi le from Photoshop is a photograph or a bitmapped

image. For purposes of this book, the term image will always mean

a piece of artwork that comprises pixels. I’m much more lax about

my vector nomenclature. Illustrator is mostly about vectors, but it

lets you import and integrate images into your vector artwork as

well. So any word that’s synonymous with graphic art will and does

suffi ce in this book.

Opening an Illustration

Opening a drawing in Illustrator is pretty much like

opening a document in any application, Adobe or oth-

erwise. It all begins with the Open command. In this

exercise, I’ll ...