Who knows Adobe Illustrator?

In My Humble Opinion
1

TL:DR, I know photoshop, how quickly can I pick up Illustrator, also, can you give me any tips to get me going?
So a few hours ago I was at work trying to do some work on Photoshop. I was having some problems trying to get some text to bend into a nice semi circle. I was just futzing around with the the arc/warp function but I figured there had to be a better way. As it turns out, at work I have PS7 and there is no better way, however, at home I have CS2 and with that you can make a circular path and write the text on the path. Perfect, I’ll just bring the file home, put the text on the path and either send it to the printer or bring it back to work to make some final tweaks.

Well, it turns out it was going to take more than 10 seconds worth or work. My copy of CS2 on my old ‘basement computer’ that I just use for paying bills and I wanted to move it to my laptop so I could play the file over the next few hours while I was watching TV since I would basically have to redo the entire project (the font didn’t carry over and I didn’t want to bring it to work and have to deal with another problem, I’ll just do it here).
I was surprised that I actually found the install file from 2008, put it on a jump drive, installed it on my laptop and got it up and running on my laptop. When it asked me to activate it, it mentioned something about being able to transfer the activation to a new computer. Not wanting to disable it on my old computer, I read up on that. Well, that notice is moot. But it turns out Adobe disabled activation on ALL CS2 software if you’ve legitimately purchased any CS2 software. In other words, since this is a legit copy of Photoshop CS2, I can download Illustrator, Photoshop, ImageReady, CreativeSuite, Various iterations of Acrobat, After Effects, Go Live, In Copy, In Design and Premiere (all from around 2008, but hey, I’ll take it, those are expensive programs, that’s several thousand dollars worth of software in it’s day).

All I’m interested in is Illustrator so I grabbed it. Trouble is, I’ve never used it. Question is, I know my way around Photoshop. Am I going to get anywhere with Illustrator? Right now I’m creating something from (more or less) nothing and it’s my understanding that that’s basically what AI was designed for. I just pulled it up and it doesn’t look totally unfamiliar. I’m aware that it’s for creating vector graphics and while I understand what the are, that doesn’t really help me much. It’s like asking someone if they know how an internal combustion engine works. Just because they say ‘yes’, doesn’t mean they can fix your car.

I’m going to play with it for a while, hopefully, I can get this project off to the printer. I’ll watch some tutorials, I’m very open to suggestions, but I have a feeling I’ll end up knocking this out on CS2 just to get it done.

Either way, I’m super excited to have Illustrator…for free.
Graphic design is yet another thing I fell into at work out of necessity. I know a little about it from my photography, but manipulating various artwork to go out to the public forced me to learn more. Designing magnets and stickers (etc) is very different than erasing a zit or making a sunset look more striking and I understand this is really what AI was designed for. In fact our logo came from the logo desingers as an AI file…which is super nice since I can scale it as big or small as I want and there’s no problems at all (see, I know at least something about vector files).

2

There are several important concepts (layers) and keyboard shortcuts that are common to both, but Illustrator is for drawing vectors, not futzing with pixels. You’ll need to get the hang of Bezier curves to get very far.

Like any complex program, there are some functions that are a bit counterintuitive or are hidden in strange places. Because I was a FreeHand maven, for instance, I find clipping paths in Illustrator to be baffling.

Type on a path is easy—in fact, Illustrator is always trying to make it happen when I don’t want it to. Draw a path (L gets you the Ellipse tool). Now T for the Text tool, and click somewhere on the path you just drew. The path will disappear and any letters you type will be along the curve of that path. The vertical lines at either end of your type allow you to move it around the ellipse.

To solve your font problems moving a small illustration from machine to machine, get the drawing like you want it, select all type objects, and then (under the Type menu) Create Outlines.

3

This should be the very LAST thing you do, when the design is finalized. Once you’ve created outlines, it’s no longer type, and can’t be edited as such.

Since your specific need is setting type on a path, familiarize yourself with the different type tools, and how they work, in the tools palette. For example, learn what to do if your type flips upside-down unexpectedly.

Illustrator is a powerful and wonderful application. Hope you’ll continue to learn its capabilities.

4

Before you create outlines, option-drag your type to the pasteboard, and leave that as type to edit later if needed. Outline only the type on the pasteboard.

5

I don’t feel like doing this right now, and I’ll try to update this if you’re interested. You will find that working with type, and any other graphic element to be far easier in Illustrator. Learn about layers. WORK WITH LAYERS. Set your type, duplicate it on another layer and outline that. Lock and hide the live type layer. Save as EPS, import to Photoshop and you have it. Want to change it? Open the Illustrator file, make changes to the LIVE TYPE, duplicate and repeat. Delete bad layers or not. Illustrator is essential for working with Photoshop if you’re working with type.

6

Long story short, I played with it for a few hours last night and it’s so different from Photoshop it was like starting over. I got what I wanted…just barely, but in the morning when I looked it over again I wanted to make one, tiny, tweak to it and just couldn’t do it. For the life of me I couldn’t move the text. I would choose that layer and try to move it and some other layer would become live and that text would move, sometimes multiple layers would move and so on for about an hour.
Eventually, I just started the project over from scratch in Photoshop CS2 and got it done. Admittedly, be it AI or Photoshop, I’ve really never worked with paths, so I still had to learn about those and that’s part of what took me a while.

What I need to do is play with some AI tutorials to get a grasp for some of the basic features of it. I’ve been using Photoshop for years and know my way around it fairly well, at least for basic stuff, but this was totally foreign. Even down to the layers working totally differently.

Having said all that, Creative Cloud seems tempting. Photoshop/AI CS2 are like 7 years old.

7

Sign up for a month or two of Lynda’s training tutorials, and they should cover all the basics:
http://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-training-tutorials/227-0.html

Edit: Here’s one specifically for CS2:
http://www.lynda.com/Illustrator-CS2-tutorials/essential-training/148-2.html

Illustrator isn’t hard to use once you get the hang of it, but it doesn’t really compete with Photoshop either. You can use both together as needed, often both on the same image. Maybe even consider Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering for more modern versions that are easier to use in a lot of ways.

8

Also, I should point out that one of the great things about later versions of the suite (maybe CS6+? maybe CC? I don’t remember) is better app interoperability, making it a cinch to co-edit a picture in both Illustrator and Photoshop, and then lay it out in InDesign or Dreamweaver, without having to convert and export back and forth in each step. You could, for example, design a brochure in InDesign, add a vector map in Illustrator, but add a Photoshop image of each point of interest to that Illustrator – all without exporting anything yet. And if you edit the Photoshop picture, it’ll trickle up to Illustrator and further up to InDesign, all automatically.

9

I do. I took an Illustrator class that took just as long as learning Photoshop.

But I learned Inkscape on my own, just like I did the GIMP, so I say it’s doable.

10

What I do, is set all my type I’ll eventually be creating outlines to on its own layer.

Then, when it’s time to create outlines, I’ll duplicate the layer, double-click the layer, and un-click the “Print” checkbox. Then I’ll also turn off the viewing of the layer by clicking it’s eyeball.

11

I attempted to play with some tutorials a few days ago and got stuck with nearly all of them. Yes, part of that was because AI is so vastly unfamiliar to me, but so was PS at one point. But the bigger reason seems to be that CS2 is so out of date that within a few steps most of them use features that my version doesn’t have and I don’t have the first clue of how to workaround. I’m going to keep playing around some more, but I’m strongly considering making the leap to CC.

I’m looking at their pricing, $9.99/mo for Photoshop, $19.99/mo for Illustrator or, if I were to, say, use my daughter’s .k12 email address, I could get the entire CC package for $19.99/mo or $199/year. (It’s $50/mo for an individual).

Does anyone know about the student discount? I think once you purchase it, you have it forever, but I’m curious if they use that email forever, if you can change it [back] after you get the deal or if it’s just used once for verification.
FTR, I’m not dead set on the whole student thing. All it really gets me, for the same price, is the rest of the programs, none of which I use anyways, but it would be nice to have a current version of Photoshop.
I wish there was a way to just get PS and AI, that’s really all I want, but from what I can tell, I’d have to get a $30 subscription for AI and a $10 subscription for PS. You can see why I’m looking into using my daughter’s email address to get the entire CC package for $20/month (or $199/year).

12

I used the student email (.edu) while I was in college, and I think they verify it again once your “term” was up (IIRC, it was a one-year contract, paid monthly).

If you were super gung-ho on ripping Adobe off, you could probably sign up for a one-unit online course at a local community college, get a student email account, and then just drop the course and get a refund. The email address would likely be good for at least a semester or so…

13

I’m just more concerned about my daughter getting an inbox full of spam, which, so far, she doesn’t. I know when I bought CS2, I started getting a lot of junk from them. For that reason, I’d rather just use the email to activate it and but keep mine as the one on the account. I suppose I can always give it a shot. If it doesn’t work, it doesn’t work.

Also, I found something else out. Contrary to the ads they show for it, you can only run it on two machines at once. If you want to run it on a third, you have to deactivate one of the. I’m not sure how big of a hassle that is, but on the forums a lot of people were complaining about that since it kind of flies in the face of the cloud concept.