Adobe Illustrator CS2, Design Projects for

A new section of each course starts monthly. If enrolling in a series of two or more courses, please be sure to space the start date for each course at least two months apart.

All courses run for six weeks, with a two-week grace period at the end. Two lessons are released each week for the six-week duration of the course. You do not have to be present when lessons are released. You will have access to all lessons until the course ends. However, the interactive discussion area that accompanies each lesson will automatically close two weeks after the lesson is released. As such, we strongly recommend that you complete each lesson within two weeks of its release.

The final exam will be released on the same day as the last lesson. Once the final exam has been released, you will have two weeks to complete all of your course work, including the final exam.

Lesson 1
If you're an absolute beginner, Lesson 1 will make you feel right at home with the main features of Illustrator's work area, its Toolbox, and its palettes. The first thing you'll learn about the work area is how to arrange the palettes to best suit the way you like to work. We'll jump right into using two of Illustrator's shapes tool, drawing rectangles and ellipses. You'll study the elements of a balanced composition, then you'll practice what you've learned in the lesson by creating your own dramatic compositions in black and white.

Lesson 2
The dreaded Pen tool! Even professional designers approach this wonderful drawing tool with fear and loathing. But there's no avoiding it, and I guarantee you'll be glad we didn't put it off. Illustrator is perhaps the most powerful vector-art program available to designers, and the Pen tool is the basic instrument for creating vector art. You'll learn the anatomy of a vector path, then you'll start getting acquainted with drawing these paths with the Pen tool. You'll start by tracing practice curves, and then photographs. By the end of this lesson, you'll be well on your way to making Pen tool your best friend!

Lesson 3
Now that you know how to draw curves with the Pen tool, you'll learn how to edit them. You'll learn how to adjust complex curves so their contours exactly match my paths. In these first few lessons, you'll do a lot of tracing. This is one of the most common tasks assigned to graphic designers, and I want you to be ready! For practice, you'll apply the design element of repetition to your Pen drawings. I'll show you a trick for creating a border by repeating a design element. This trick has turned out to be a class favorite. At this point in the course, students say they're amazed at how much they've learned about Illustrator in less than two week!

Lesson 4
This lesson is packed! I'll introduce you to the Pencil tool that you'll use for freehand drawing, and then I'll show you more tricks for editing paths. You will learn more about managing your art in the Layers palette, and finally, I'll introduce you to live-paint groups. The Live Paint Bucket tool and its little cousin the Live Paint Selection tool are perhaps the biggest Illustrator innovations in years! These features allow you to join multiple paths into single groups that you can edit and color freely. For designers working with complex drawings, this new technique is a marvel. In the design project, you'll explore the impact of reversing black-on-white and white-on-black.

Lesson 5
Finally, color! After the first two weeks of the course, you'll have a firm foundation in creating and managing vector art. Now it's time to cut loose and start playing with color. You'll learn how to create your own colors, how to save them, and how to apply them to your vector art. You'll also start using filters and learn the difference between filters and effects. This lesson is a lot of work, but students don't seem to notice because it's so much fun. The design project is a comical bouquet of flowers that you'll use later in the course to create your own brushes.

Lesson 6
Typography is a centuries-old art that still fascinates us today. Today you'll explore the basics of typography while you learn to use the Type tool to create text. You'll learn how to fill a shape with text and how to flow text along paths and around shapes. I'll teach you my Golden Rule of Font Selection and show you how to use the Character palette to select and style your fonts. Finally, you'll get to try your hand at font selection and styling.

Lesson 7
Now that you know a few of the basics of typography and the Type tool, you'll learn how to dress up your text with gradients and effects. You'll begin by learning how to create beautiful color gradients in the Gradient palette. You'll explore some of the gradient libraries, which are collections of delicious preset gradients. You'll practice applying your gradients to vector paths and to text, and you'll practice using the Gradient tool to change the direction of the gradient. In the design project, you'll create an announcement for a special event using gradients, text, and every other trick you've learned so far. This is another project that seems to catch students' imaginations!

Lesson 8
You may wonder what's left to learn about Illustrator. Well, we've only begun. Illustrator's Brushes palette lets you create every manner of brush for embellishing your designs. Illustrator CS2 doesn't have the rich collection of brushes found in previous versions. But that won't stop us. Once I've shown you how to apply and modify the available brushes, I'll show you how to create hundreds more brushes by borrowing from Illustrator's Symbols palette. And when we're done with that, I'll show you how to use your own vector art to create more brushes. The design project is an open-ended invitation to let your imagination go where it takes you. But just in case you'd prefer a guide, I've given you instructions for recreating a couple of my own designs.

Lesson 9
The Blend tool is just plain fun! You can use it for practical things, such as creating highlights and shadows in your drawings. But you can also use it for creating unbelievable special effects. You'll learn how to create blends from vector objects and how to control the color effects you get from the blends. Though we won't work with animations, you should know that one important use of the blend tool is to create the transitioning figures for animations. You'll apply blends to the flowers in your Lesson 5 bouquet to create special effects that I call Art Deco and Electric Glow. In the design project, you'll draw a simple egg with highlights and shadows, then you'll use a function in the Pathfinder palette to crack open the egg for breakfast.

Lesson 10
The Mesh tool scares almost as many designers as the Pen tool does. That's a shame, because you can get amazing shading and airbrush effects with the Mesh tool. Once you get the hang of it, the Mesh tool is easy to understand, if still challenging. There's enough to learn about the Mesh tool, that we'll stay with it for this lesson and the next one. First, you'll learn the anatomy of mesh objects, how to create them, and how to apply color to them. I'll show you a quick way to create the illusion of an object moving forward and receding in space. And in the design project, you'll practice creating airbrush highlighting effects on a vase.

Lesson 11
We'll continue with mesh objects in this lesson. Though I showed you how to apply color to mesh objects in Lesson 10, I didn't explain exactly what happens to the color one you've applied it. The key to understanding how to create colorful airbrush effects with the Mesh tool is to understand exactly how Illustrator distributes color over the mesh object. I'll show you exactly how that works. I'll also show you how to edit the contours of lines within mesh objects. These lines behave much the same way vector paths do, which means you'll learn a few more tricks for editing vector paths. You'll learn another way to draw shadows that are a little more subtle than the ones you get with blends. And finally, in the design project, you'll use mesh objects to draw draped fabric!

Lesson 12
This lesson is full of information, but it's the easiest lesson in the course and a lot of fun. You'll learn a few new ways to embellish text. I'll introduce you to Illustrator's 3-D effects, which you will use in a banner of Congratulations for a job well done. In two supplements to this lesson, I'll introduce you to Illustrator's Live Trace and Bridge features. In another favorite design project among students, you'll design your own book cover using everything you've learned in the course.