For anyone looking to get started in using the Illustrator software made by Adobe, this course shows you how to manipulate shapes, and use the tools needed to get you creating art like a pro.
Link to Course here
Current Specifications:
- Level: Beginner
- Duration: 1h 36m
- Released: 04.04.2011
- Software Required: Illustrator CS5 or newer.
Pros
The tutor goes into depth about what vector graphics are, and their advantages over pixel based graphics, and he uses a sample from Photoshop in order to explain it. I found this information quite useful. You could argue that it is not necessarily needed in a course teaching you how to use Illustrator, but for any newbie who is wondering WHY they would use Illustrator, the tutor explains just that. Vector graphics can be easily scaled up and down, and produce sharp outlines perfect for logos and any graphics that you may want to reproduce on various media. If your drawing skills are not that great then you may prefer to try using Illustrator, as the tools make editing shapes easier, so you are not required to get each stroke of the pen/brush right the first time. This course does a good job of showing you how.
Screenshot showing parts of a curve made in Illustrator.
The tutor does a good job of explaining how to manipulate the controls on each shape made. He also talks about shortcuts that you can use on the keyboard which, once you learn them can be much more efficient in editing your creations. He doesn’t cover ALL the tools, but as this is a Beginners guide, you can assume that a beginner would not need all of them right away, and instead should master the basics to start with.
You are shown how to organise the parts of your drawings into groups and layers. Rather than just being shown the tools how to make graphics, he explains how to sort out the clutter that could potentially be off-putting depending on how complex you want to make your graphics. It’s nice that the course goes that step further in preaching good practices while using the software.
Cons
The lessons end up with the creation of the image you see above of an old box with creepy tentacles poking out of it. As cool as this was, and even though it’s a beginner course, I still would have liked to learn how to make more than just one picture in this course. Without investigating further, I do not know if Pluralsight provides sufficient ‘’in-betweener’’ Illustrator lessons, or if you are forced to jump from this Beginner course to Advanced. I’ll keep you posted as I progress with my studies.
Summary
This course showed me how easy it actually was to make what first looked like a complicated image, in less than 2 hours. I would have liked to further my knowledge by going through at least one more image with the tutor in this course, but having said that, I still liked the lessons and found them pretty good as an introduction to Adobe Illustrator.
