If you read the "what" page of this website, you probably noticed how much I ranted and raved about Adobe Illustrator. Well, fact is I love that program. How much do I love that program? A lot...

Okay, in short, Illustrator is a program which renders what you call "vector images." These images maintain their resolution regardless of what magnification you choose to view them at, because they are Mathematically Defined.

You didn't know we'd be getting into all of this nerdy stuff, did ya? You thought we were going to talk about deep social issues, huh? Well, you're wrong. This page is all about one thing: Illustrator and why you should use it.

Picture this:

You're fifteen years old, staring into the face of your pentium Gateway monstrosity, downloading Adobe Photoshop off of your favorite Warez site. "All my friends use Photoshop, 'cuz it's an expensive program used by professionals!"

This is true...but...

(By the way, I'd like to take this time to remind you that you should buy Adobe products if at all possible. You get the tech support, the user license, everything. The folks at ol' Adobe work hard to make the world a better place, so they deserve what little compensation we can give them)

...Anyway, what that little spud doesn't realize is that Adobe Photoshop is the foundation of a graphics package that--if you were interested in, at the very least, webpage creation--would include Photoshop, Adobe ImageReady, Illustrator, Macromedia Flash, and a good HTML editor (I use, as I have said, Macromedia's Dreamweaver 2, but I won't really discriminate on anything, although professionally i would avoid MS Front Page).

Illustrator is important, though, because you can render perfect line graphics quickly and easily (once you get the hang of the program). For instance, the circular logos in the upper-left-hand corners of all of the pages here are all made in Illustrator and modified in Photoshop. You can make charming little logos, amazing graphics, fantastic page layouts...all in one big program.

Why is Illustrator so avoided? Simple, because its interface is at best...odd. In Photoshop, you have tools like the airbrush, the pencil, the brush...basically like creating art in the "real world." Illustrator, on the other hand has essentialy one tool, and some elaborations on it. That one tool is the pen tool, and it is elaborated by certain tools which generate circles, squares, gradient meshes (i.e., blended color), basically things that make a line. You also have the option of filling in these objects with a color or swatch of your choice.

Another thing about the pen tool is that you're not specifically drawing with the pen tool, actually you're plotting lines along points you generate using the pen tool. This is what makes Illustrator so inaccessable, I think: there's not much you can do in the "real world" to elaborate upon the Illustrator "Experience." It really is intimidating to a first time user, and by five minutes, I was only able to generate simple line drawings using the pencil tool (which handles like a "normal" pencil, but still only functions to plot out lines along points that are generated by the tool).

This is why I recommend that you should, if you plan to use Illustrator, pick up a good how-to manual on the topic. The one I have is Illustrator 8 for Windows and Macintosh Visual Quickstart Guide by Elaine Weinmann and Peter Lourekas. Comprehensive...useful...what else should I ask for?

I can't really tell you in words how great Illustrator is. Eventually I hope to show you as I update the page with images that I have created in Illustrator (I'll still use the other programs, too...I promise!). Until then...

Carpe Ars Digital,

Bob