Adobe Illustrator CS Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

by Adobe Creative Team (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

How often have you wished you had access to the team behind your favorite software--in this case, Adobe Illustrator--so that you could really pick their brains about all of its coolest features? With this book, you do. In these pages the Adobe Creative Team gives you a guided tour of the graphics powerhouse, Illustrator CS. Best of all, it does so at your pace. Whether your beautifully designed graphics end up in print, the Web, broadcast video, or even cell phone displays, this book shows you how to get them there--easily, elegantly, and efficiently. You'll find step-by-step, project-based lessons in all of Illustrator's key features, including those that are new to CS: powerful new type tools, the Scribble Effect, hundreds of professionally designed templates, support for 3D graphics, and more. Each chapter contains a project that builds on your growing knowledge of the program, and a companion CD includes all the files needed to complete the book's lessons.

About the Author

The Adobe Creative Team is made up of designers, writers, and editors who have extensive, real-world knowledge of and expertise in using Adobe products. They work closely with the Adobe product development teams and Adobe's Instructional Communications team to come up with creative, challenging, and visually appealing projects to help both new and more experienced users get up to speed quickly on Adobe software products.

Product Details

• Paperback: 592 pages
• Publisher: Adobe Press (October 23, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0321193806
• ISBN-13: 978-0321193803
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 7.3 x 1.2 inches
• Shipping Weight: 2.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars See all reviews (44 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #303,356 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

  Popular in this category: (What's this?)

  #35 in

  Books > Computers & Internet > Graphic Design > Adobe Illustrator

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

113 of 114 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A gem among computer books!, July 13, 2005

By	David Simon (Utah) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Adobe Illustrator CS2 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

This is the first time that I've written a recommendation for a book, but I'm so excited about Adobe Illustrator CS2 Classroom in a Book, I have to share my impressions with prospective buyers. Simply stated, after stumbling around in other Illustrator books, this one at last is what I've been looking for all along. All computer books should be designed and written like this one. It's organized like a classroom lesson guide, and the step by step instructions are concise, immediate, and so far as I can tell, leave nothing out. The overall impression is of having a truly competent instructor leaning over your shoulder. By the time I finished the introductory lesson, "A quick tour of Adobe Illustrator CS2," I'd learned more about this wonderful application than I had learned on my own in many months of blood, sweat, and tears! Not to mention undoing some bad habits I had developed, and showing me the quickest and most effective ways to accomplish the bedrock basics of Illustrator. After all, the book was written by the same people who invent each new release of Illustrator, so the logic of their approach is... well, logical. Add to this an instinctive feel for the mystical science of teaching, and you have in my opinion the perfect book for really learning Adobe Illustrator CS2. I heartily recommend it! Oh, yes, it's in full color, too.

84 of 85 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars THE Book from THE Source, July 7, 2005

By	John Matlock "Gunny" (Winnemucca, NV) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

This review is from: Adobe Illustrator CS2 Classroom in a Book (Paperback)

This is THE Illustrator book. It's the official book from Adobe press, the official training workbook from Adobe Systems, it's even written by Adobe (well ... people at Adobe). This new edition is printed in full color, a great improvement over earlier books that were mostly black and white with a small section of full color pages.

Color is important in Illustrator because a very small percentage of the work you'll be doing is in black and white. If the book is telling you something about color and illustrating it in black and white, it's hard to know what they are talking about.

This book has fifteen lessons that you can complete very quickly if you know what they are talking about but take longer if you're a complete beginner. The first lesson starts out with a simulated advertisement and gets you started making changes to the ad. This approach is helpful in remembering what the various tools you've used really do. Primarily in tutorial style, this book is a supplement to the reference type documentation supplied with Illustrator. It provides a good way to get started and to have a complete presentation with logical flow from start to finish.

The CD supplied with the book contains illustrations from the lessons, a collection of fonts, and other materials.

All in all, this book is well written, simple to follow, tells you enough to become if not a true expert, at least an advanced intermediate user. What more can you ask out of a book?

67 of 68 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Start here if you're new to the world of Illustrator, February 5, 2004

By	ghibli99 (the West Coast, USA) - See all my reviews

Adobe Illustrator CS Classroom in a Book provides a solid foundation for beginners and novices of the Illustrator application. As someone who was intimidated by vector graphics, I found this book to be a great introduction to the power of Illustrator, and provided me with some good ideas for my own projects.

This book, like many other Classroom in a Book texts, provides step-by-step instructions on how to do some of Illustrator's most popular and useful commands. Users of Photoshop will notice lots of similarities in the interface and tools, yet there are differences between commands that do the same thing (such as Ctrl+D to deselect in Photoshop, and Ctrl+Shift+A to deselect in Illustrator).

The Illustrator book in particular, however, was full of typographical errors that seemed rather embarrassing for being an official Adobe training book. While I understand the importance of being on bookshelves in a timely manner, taking a few extra days to properly proof their text would be appreciated by this particular user. This is especially true when considering the book's price, and the fact that the book is black and white, except for a small color section. The paper and type, however, are excellent, and the binding is flexible, while being strong at the same time.

I found this book to be a lot more in-depth than the Photoshop CS Classroom in a Book, as this text went on to describe the steps in clearer detail. It offers clear explanations for many of the choices that the user is instructed to make, while also focusing more time on the interesting exercises, as opposed to tasks that are rather redundant between any other similar application.

It will take the user approximately forty-five minutes to an hour and a half to complete each of the 19 lessons, making the book's completion time about one week.

Some of the book's later chapters deal with Illustrator-Photoshop workflows, so having Photoshop in addition to Illustrator is recommended. The book questionably refers the user to use the outdated Photoshop version 6 later in the book, leading me to believe that the author failed to update the text to the current version. Also be aware that some naming conventions do not match up with the application 100%. They are close, but I found it odd that many of these were not cross-checked for exact matches.

All in all, after completing this book, I am ready to move on to more specialized books on Illustrator, and look forward to implementing what I've learned to create streamlined work pipelines between this, Photoshop, and other graphic/layout programs.