Real World Adobe® Illustrator® CS2

Chapter 8. Mixing It Up: Working with Vectors and Pixels

There’s no velvet rope barring entry to Adobe Illustrator’s exclusive vector graphics club. Pixels are always welcomed inside. In fact, in the last chapter, we learned how certain Live Effects use pixels to produce their appearance. In Illustrator, there is indeed a peaceful coexistence between vectors and pixels, and as we discussed back in Chapter 2, Vectors 101, there are benefits to combining both vectors and pixels (such as adding a soft drop shadow to text). There’s no reason why you should feel that you have to choose only one graphic type or the other.

Although Illustrator does have the ability to support pixels in some ways (as we’ll see throughout this chapter), it in no way replaces ...