Graphic design help

[oyceter]

Does anyone have favorite Illustrator tutorials? Bonus points for things that are insanely easy and yet possibly unintuitive to someone used to Photoshop. I.e. when you have a ton of outlined shapes and just want to select one shape, how do you select just one when clicking with the black arrow selects everything? Why do I not have a nice box-y select tool? (Or do I?)

Also, general tips and tricks for vector graphics highly appreciated.

(Basically, I opened Illustrator, played with a file, then promptly freaked out and closed it, which seems to be the way I react to all Adobe products I meet for the first time.)

Comments

[laurashapiro.livejournal.com]

I always recommend Creative Cow (http://www.creativecow.net) for tutorials, but I haven't done any of their Illustrator ones.

However: I use Illustrator all the time and would be more than happy to give you some hands-on, in-person training when we see each other next.

[oyceter]

Thank you! That would be awesome, actually.

[telophase.livejournal.com]

I cannot truly answer your question as the number of times I have successfully grappled with Illustrator is shamefully small, but I can direct your attention to the blog VectorTuts (http://vectortuts.com/), which mostly deals with Illustrator. I have it in my RSS reader and have several tuts bookmarked. I just haven't actually tried any of them. XD

[oyceter]

Thanks!

[jinian.livejournal.com]

I made Wim show me how to use Inkscape (a free vector drawing program), because I could never get Illustrator to make a bit of sense. Now I can make reasonably cool stuff, so I recommend the in-person tutorial.

[oyceter]

I think I am totally going to take people up on it.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

I used to be an expert back on Illustrator 6 (I don't know what they're on now), bring over your computer next time we hang out and I'll run through some stuff for you.

They keep changing stuff...it's really frustrating!

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

Anymore I tend to just google desperately until I find a forum where somebodyhas the same problem as me, b/c the help files are often unhelpful and I can't usually find a tutorial that has exactly what I need.

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

So far, what I remember being the "trickiest" thing for new people was playing with the bezier handles to adjust the curves. Adding more points, subtracting them, etc.

[oyceter]

Thanks, that would actually be awesome! Except the program's on my desktop; would you be willing to drop by?

[yeloson.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I can stop by some time after work, and bring back your DVDs. (I'll try to dig up Kino and get that to you as well). I'm usually not getting out of work until 7, what days are good for you?

[thistleingrey.livejournal.com]

I haven't used many of these (there are many!), but you might skim one (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2009/01/04/50-excellent-adobe-illustrator-video-tutorials/), two (http://www.smashingmagazine.com/2008/02/05/illustrator-tutorials-best-of/).

For selecting, I usually right-click the pesky in-the-way object and send it to the back temporarily.

[oyceter]

Thanks!

Frex--

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

Here is something really annoying which happens sometimes for no obvious reason that I can discern, in CS2: you can click on things but you can't resize them, or highlight text. Not with either arrow/the text tool. It's not locked, you can still move things, just not adjust them (the handles are gone, too.) It is very Hulk-smash-making.

But! CTRL-SHIFT-B usually makes it stop, whatever "it" is (the explanation was "blah blah blah handles muddle tweetle-beetles battle" as far as I was concerned.)

Re: Frex--

[oyceter]

Huh, thanks for the tip!

You're welcome,

[bellatrys.livejournal.com]

I suspect it's caused by a combination of keyboard shortcuts + keyboard lag on the older, slower computer at work - there are so many bizarre features buggy annoyances that are very difficult to find in Help indexes (another one, in Photoshop, is that caps loc can disable your brush size choices!) because you don't have any way of knowing how the writers chose to describe/index what it was that happened!

My favorite way of avoiding the "grab too many things" problem with Illustrator wireframes, btw, especially when there are lots of overlapping bits, is to put all my elements on separate layers, just like in Photoshop, and lock the ones I'm not using at the moment. It is less frustrating for me, tho' of course YMMV.