Getting better all the time: Illustrator

When we first began using Illustrator, we were so frustrated. All the time. We couldn’t understand how everythng worked. We came from a Photoshop world, and the fluidity of Illustrator bugged the hell out of us.

For a set of docs at Le Job, we opted to create TIFFs instead of AIs, only because the set of P’shop tools was so much handier than Illustrator’s.

But we persisted. WE struggled, we read books, we learned. And now, we are proud to say that we have remade a lot of those old images which, frankly, ended up looking blocky and choppy in print and PDF form. Now we have glorious vector graphics that are smooth smooth smooth! It makes us very happy. And we have smart looking graphics that are very controllable and adaptable.

Edit: We caught ourselves this evening, while working with P’shop, marvelling at how it doesn’t treat objects independent objects. And so we come full-circle.

Along the way, we found CreativePro and Adobe Proxy magazines, both of which offer up good tips and advice for burgeoning designers. And in our jack of all trades magic switchblade, we find we are designing more and more every day. (Now if only InDesign Mag was free….)

On another slightly different note, we think the MyFonts’s utlity What the Font is pretty darn neat. Upload a file and they will tell what the font used is.