WHY SHOULD YOU USE ILLUSTRATOR?

We briefly touched on some of the uses of Adobe Illustrator earlier, but we have plenty of interesting tutorials lined up to help you get stuck into some imaginative projects in forthcoming issues. We keep comparing it to Photoshop, not necessarily in how similar it is, but how high it sits in the industry hierarchy. Illustrator is the industry standard for creative design work that uses shapes, colors, typography, logos, and so on.

If you are creative and have a talent for art, Illustrator could be a great way for you to step up your skills to create something digitally. It’s a great tool for creating artwork exactly how you want it. We aren’t disparaging traditional art methods, but if you make a mistake on paper, you can’t exactly press Ctrl-Z, can you? With Illustrator, you don’t have to worry about making errors and can add to your work as much as you like.

For us, the big appeal of using Illustrator to create digital art is the vector aspect, which in simple terms means that you don’t end up with super-jagged edges to your work. The EPS and SVG files that you export from Illustrator can be scaled up as much as you want, and they don’t lose any quality. However, if you created the same artwork in Photoshop and zoomed in, it would probably look like something you’d find in Minecraft— that should give you a visual idea of the differences between the two. You can also easily pair up a graphics tablet with Illustrator, enabling you to transfer your hand-drawn artwork straight to your PC. If you wanted to sell your digital art, this is a great route to go down, and by using sites such as Adobe’s Behance ( www.behance.net), you can easily showcase your work online to a very large network of designers.