Adobe Illustrator CS3 Uses

Print or Web Artwork Creation with Endless Possibilities

Jun 28, 2008

Adobe Illustrator Great Creative Tools in Action, David Borrink

Adobe Illustrator offers creative flexibility for projects from postage stamps to posters. Artwork is created and saved in formats for print, publications or web pages.

Size Matters

Whether a project is a bookmark, a DVD label, or a billboard, Adobe Illustrator CS3 offers designers and illustrators powerful creative tools and adjustable document sizes to create artwork for virtually any project. And since Adobe Illustrator is based on vectors, artwork can be reduced or enlarged with incredible flexibility.

Great Creative Tools

Designers and illustrators use Adobe Illustrator’s powerful tools to draw shapes with straight or curved lines, add text, import photographic images, and apply a wide variety of styles and effects. Artwork can be simple or complex. Styles and effects can be added, changed, or removed from individual items without changing the rest of the document’s elements. This flexibility allows for great creative options within a project.

Print or Web-based Artwork

Adobe Illustrator can be used to create artwork for use in print projects whether it’s completed within Adobe Illustrator, imported into a page layout program like Adobe InDesign, or saved as a Portable Document Format (PDF) file. Adobe Illustrator artwork can also be exported in file formats for use in programs such as Adobe Flash and Adobe Dreamweaver to help create dynamic interactive web content. For example, a designer can create a logo in Adobe Illustrator, save it as a PDF file to send to a client for review, complete the final art in a file format to add to a brochure layout in Adoe InDesign, and then provide a web-ready logo to use in Adobe Dreamweaver to create a web site.

Page Layout, but Not Pages

Artwork is created in Adobe Illustrator as a single page document. While there are print features in Adobe Illustrator which allow large sized documents to be printed out in multiple pages using a standard printer (this process is known as “tiling”), it is best to not use Adobe Illustrator as a page layout program to set up a magazine or other publication. That is a purpose better suited for Adobe InDesign, which is a powerful multi-page design program.

Better Charts and Graphs

Designers can take data from spreadsheet programs such as Microsoft Excel and import it into Adobe Illustrator to create visually appealing charts and graphs. In turn, these can then be saved for use in print or web projects, or saved into formats to bring back into Microsoft Office programs such as Word, Excel and Powerpoint.

With all these features, Adobe Illustrator is one of the most flexible and versatile programs available for designers and illustrators.

The copyright of the article Adobe Illustrator CS3 Uses in Graphic Design Software is owned by David Borrink. Permission to republish Adobe Illustrator CS3 Uses in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.