Customer Reviews

Adobe Illustrator CS2 Gone Wild

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I really hate to pan a book because I have a lot of respect for the effort that goes into writing one but do yourself a favor and skip this one.
I purchased it based on the rave reviews below and then when I recieved it I knew immediatly that I had to return it. Illustrator Gone Wild is a sophmoric effort. At best it's worth flipping through while in the book store but it's not worth taking home. If you've bothered to learn Illustrator from a class or a good book, such as Adobe's Classroom in a book series, then you all ready have the skills and knowledge to do everything in the book such as the chapter on making Kiss type. (Which I doubt you'll ever be called upon to do) But if you want to learn something about the details of making clean professional or even attractive art then you'll find this book lacking, as I did.
The key thing that interested me in the book was the promised chapter on photo-realism and the review that said this book was like the WoW series only more project oriented. The details on photo-realism were so scant that one could pick up all this book had to say in 30 minutes of trying to trace and color a shiny metal object. This book's similarity to the WoW series ends at being a book with chapters, words and pictures. While it does offer more detail in steps to create art than WoW the projects it offers are the kind of thing you'd do on a Sunday afternoon for fun or for a friend's band who can't afford to pay you but not the kind of thing you'd show at work, in a portfolio or try to sell freelance.

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Many people first take look at cover and then decide if they want to buy book or not. When i first took a look at cover of this book i wasn't really impressed by it. But later when i already had it in my hands i understood why. Because cover is glossy and if you want to scan a cover - it's become almost impossible. It's the same that scanning silver or gold cover. But if you buy this book in usual store I am sure that it will attract your attention.

From other hand cover of this book - it don't try to impress you with pretty pictures on cover or big words to make you but it. It gives you exactly that why you buy this book - practical knowledges that you can use when you need it.

This is a great book for beginners and intermediate users of Adobe Illustrator. You can study or improve your knowledges on practice. The book is full of different kind of tasks (54 in total if to be precise). Every of them presents unique value and exotic experience. Every tutorial is explored to the maximum, all the possible options are explained clearly.

During this tasks you will work with many interesting Illustrator tools as mesh, path tools, blends, 3D spirals, Live Paint (which allows you to paint those vector graphics as if you are painting them by hand) and many other.

If you create digital animation, you will appreciate chapter number 11 where you create layers to manipulate individual parts for character animation. When everything is ready, you can preview the animation frames and then export them as a draft in the Flash format.

Book includes many highlighted "notes," "tips," and "warnings", "cautions", "alternatives" interspersed throughout the book. Notes will give you addition information or alternative actions, warning will notify you in advance about tricky moments and tips will will make your work a bit more easy.

My favorite effects in this book are graffiti and Dracula effects. Last effect you can overview on companion website. I'm sure you will find where to use it in your projects.

In my opinion, David Karlins and Bruce Hopkins made a great work. Book is good written, very friendly, easy to follow, the page layout is very clean, and the readability of this book is very high.
This book is an excellent guide to performing wild effects. For more information visit companion website and find more information about this great book.

There are three things that I really like about this book:
1. There are good illustrations that showcase step-by-step transformations of how each technique and tool was used to get to the "end goal"
2. There is a companion website that is fun to browse and helpful if you want some guidance with Adobe Illustrator but don't have the time or money to take a class
3. The tips on the Blend tool were especially helpful for me; they gave me new ideas for what I could be using this tool for when constructing illustrations

My personal preference for the style, layout and 'final' projects the book takes you through were not especially inspiring or attractive to me. For me, the layout of the book made reading it hard to follow and difficult to get engaged.

A well written book, but I would reccommend that you peek through it at a local bookstore so you can see if it fits your style or not before you go out and purchase it.

I'm usually under intense deadline pressure, and the learning curve for a particular technique can sometimes cost me valuable time. I just don't have time to really play with Illustrator, and thus a lot of the cutting edge features - particularly those that have emerged and evolved over the past two or three revisions - have unfortunately eluded me at times. While there are other books that touch on these features, 3D Effects in particular, there is no book anywhere close to Illustrator Gone Wild. The WOW book is a beautifully composed book. But it isn't an intense exploration of cutting edge design techniques like Gone Wild is. This one has been very helpful to me, allowing me to pick up techniques more or less verbatim, or riff in a related direction. Nice going, Dave and Mark.

This is the freshest and most useful Illustrator book I've seen in a long time. First of all, it's a joy just to look at, packed with inspirational illustrator artwork that not only promise great lessons, but which plant creative ideas for your own illustrator work. Then there are the techniques themselves -- awesome and sophisticated results that are somehow made easy with the distilled step-by-step. Finally, there's the writing, which is irreverent and fun throughout. Nice work, guys!

Any serious Illustrator artist should pick up this book. It's similar to "Wow," but more project oriented, a lot more fun, and yes....a bit wild. David Karlins and Bruce Hopkins have done a good job at providing a book that's not only a referense, but a muse. It will serve to get your juices flowing, and the techniques may make you some money.

Even though I have used Illustrator for several years, I found the steps and tips a little confusing. I bought this book to increase my knowledge.
It wasn't too helpful, especially when steps are skipped, and the tips don't correspond with the instructions. In one area the instructions read, "expand and ungroup, (about a million times) to delete the wireframe." Didn't work for me.

Not for beginners. Tips and adjoining windows don't seem to match. Projects were helpful in teaching you to be able to use the techniques for your own projects or creativity. But on the whole I don't feel the book was worth the price.

I love it, it is an advance book. not too good for beginners.

Excellent execution and useful techniques. There's no letup in color and zing from page to page, and there's real meat behind all of the pretty pictures. Just one of these techniques will probably earn back the book price (which isn't bad to begin with) nearly 100 times over. I'm proud to say "I've gone wild."