Adobe Illustrator CS

Advanced Level 

Illustrator might be a vector program but that 
doesn’t restrict it to plain-looking artwork. With a little know-how you can easily put some extra life into flat graphics with creative gradients, masks, photographs, 
special effects, and even 3D rotations, with professional 
illustrative flair. 

Useful to you if:

you need to produce or amend any basic graphic items from the list above.

 Before the course, you should:

be able to produce accurate bezier shapes;

have some basic prior experience of the Illustrator package;

be familiar with the main Illustrator palettes.

 At the end of the day’s course you will:

• have produced an iconic graph, a designed map, a stylised illustration from a photograph, and a 3D object;

• be armed with some tips on how to improve workflow;

• be comfortable with complex blends, gradient meshes, symbols and brushes.

• know some expert-user keyboard shortcuts.

 Course contents (may vary slightly):

Recap of principles

Preferences, displays and cursors

Measurement units

Tool palette overview with options

Navigation

Paths

Maximising pathfinder

Divide objects below

Clean up

Splitting

Editing

Brushes

Painting, applying, new

Libraries

Options

Colour

Patterns and tiles

Inverting and complementing colours

Swatch libraries

Gradients and meshes, warping meshes

Transparent meshes

Trapping options

Advanced stroke options, effects

Smart Usage

Smart guides

Turning shapes into guides

Envelope distortion

Actions: playing, editing and recording

Special Effects

3D extrude, 3D rotate

Bevels, importing bevels

Graphic styles and libraries

Images

Using a clipping path on an image

Sampling from an image

Colour adjustment

Graphs

Entering and controlling graph data

Map conversion

Importing Excel data

Editing and applying 3D effects

Applying pictographic effects

Transparency

Object transparency, blending modes, opacity masking

Blend isolation

Transparency flattener

Output

Legacy files

With transparency

Export options

Exporting paths

Best formats for inDesign import

File formats (and transparency support)

PDFs

Printing: considerations

Colour separations

Page tiling

Custom start-up file

Templates

Keyboard shortcuts

Project achievements:

Graph with icons

Map with graphics

Stylised illustration from a photograph

3D object

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