Description:
This outstanding full-color book shows you how to create compelling images in Adobe Illustrator 7 for Macintosh and Windows. The author, Sharon Steuer, starts out with two chapters on the basics of the package, explaining Bezier curves and Bezier-editing tools, geometric objects, grouping, graphing, transformations, palettes, views, color, image formats, and printing. Exercises teach you how to work with some of these features and use Illustrator's keyboard commands to improve your productivity. The heart of the book features hands-on exercises wherein you apply a variety of artistic techniques. You work with lines, fills, colors, templates, layers, blends, gradients, filters, type, layout, masks, and special effects; receive advice on working with other programs, such as Adobe Photoshop; and get tips on creating Web and multimedia graphics. Steuer provides lots of illustrations as well as suggestions, and when she just touches upon one feature, she refers you to other sections where it is explored in greater detail. In the course of her writing, Steuer contacted a wide variety of graphic artists, who contributed their own artwork along with descriptions of how they achieved various effects in this artwork. (All of this is in the image Galleries.) These contributors also provided many of the book's tips. The book is geared toward everyone from beginner to expert user, but it'll help to be pretty comfortable with the package before you delve into the advanced techniques. Appendices include contact information for the contributing artists and for companies whose products are referred to in the book. There's also a list of other useful graphics books. The companion CD-ROM includes clip art images, fonts, demo software, filters, tutorials, and more.
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