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Adobe Illustrator CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques

Adobe Illustrator CS3 is more than just the world's most popular and powerful illustration tool: As part of the Adobe's Creative Suite 3, it's a key component of an overall design workflow that lets users work seamlessly among all of their graphics applications to create graphically rich content for print, Web, motion graphics, and mobile devices. This info-packed guide lets users get right down to work by focusing on the Illustrator CS3 features they're most likely to use and showcasing each in a stand-alone tip--complete with a relevant hint or two and a graphic example. In this fashion, readers learn just what they need to know, exploring the program in a way that makes sense to them. Before they know it, users will be using the new path eraser tool and making vivid artwork using the new Live Color feature and the updated recolor filters, as well as creating symbols and applying instances and exporting their work to Adobe Flash.

Paperback: 272 pages

Publisher: Adobe Press; 1 edition (August 18, 2007)

Language: English

ISBN-10: 0321508947

ISBN-13: 978-0321508942

Product Dimensions: 7 x 0.6 x 9 inches

Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces

Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (27 customer reviews)

Best Sellers Rank: #561,721 in Books (See Top 100 in Books) #38 in Books > Computers & Technology > Digital Audio, Video & Photography > Adobe > Adobe Illustrator #230 in Books > Computers & Technology > Software > Design & Graphics #244 in Books > Computers & Technology > Graphics & Design > Desktop Publishing

Adobe Illustrator CS3 (for short, AI) is the top software for creating vector artwork, that's infinitely scalable with perfectly crisp edges (as opposed to bitmap images, like JPGs, that become jagged when their size is increased). AI is capable of some gorgeous effects -- not just objects or typography but "painterly" gradient shadings -- that can be scaled in size from a tiny drawing to a billboard without any loss of perfectly smooth edges. The trouble comes in learning how to use the daunting AI, which feels much less intuitive than, say, Photoshop. Enter Adobe Illustrator CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques, by David Karlins and Bruce K. Hopkins. Through a hundred concise chapters, covering every important aspect of AI with clear hands-on directions, the authors have made AI as "user-friendly" as, say, Dreamweaver CS3 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques by David Karlins (I also gave it a 5-star review here at ), and for many of the same reasons.Adobe's software can achieve the miraculous... if you know how to use it. BIG "IF"! But I do not like their built-in Help items, that more often than not send you down one rabbit hole after another, before (maybe) giving the information needed to accomplish a particular task. (The fact that the process usually turns out to be "simple" -- go to this menu item, do that -- never makes me feel any better.) And scrolling through the massive manual in PDF format to look up what you need is equally un-fun and time-consuming. But this AI CS3 How-Tos book is great because it can go into much more detail than the built-in Help items, yet it's much more flexible and comprehensive than even the massive Adobe Classroom in a Book (CiB).

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