Real World Adobe Illustrator CS3

Chapter Nine. 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 welcome inside. In fact, in the previous chapter, you 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 in Chapter 2, Vectors 101, you can gain benefits by 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 you’ll see throughout this chapter), it in no ...