Adobe Illustrator CS4

About Digital Classroom

Adobe® Illustrator® CS4 lets you create artwork for a variety of uses. Illustrator’s drawing tools let you take advantage of many ways to control color, text, and artwork in your designs.Illustrator provides you with ways to express your creative ideas and experiment with the presentation. Illustrator CS4 is also tightly integrated with other Adobe products such as Photoshop® CS4 and Flash® CS4 Professional.

Adobe Illustrator CS4 Digital Classroom is like having your own personal instructor guiding you through each lesson while you work at your own speed. This book includes 12 self-paced lessons that let you discover essential skills and explore the new features and capabilities of Illustrator CS4. Each lesson includes step-by-step instructions, lesson fi les, and video tutorials, all of which are available on the included DVD. This book has been developed by the same team of Adobe Certifi ed Instructors and Illustrator experts who have created many of the offi cial training titles for Adobe Systems.

Prerequisites
Before you start the lessons in Illustrator CS4 Digital Classroom, you should have a working knowledge of your computer and its operating system. You should know how to use the directory system of your computer so that you can navigate through folders. You need to understand how to locate, save, and open fi les. You should also know how to use your mouse to access menus and commands.

Before starting the lessons fi les in Illustrator CS4 Digital Classroom, make sure that you have installed Adobe Illustrator CS4. The software is sold separately, and not included with this book. You may use the 30-day trial version of Adobe Illustrator CS4 available at the adobe.com web site, subject to the terms of its license agreement.

System requirements

Before starting the lessons in Illustrator CS4 Digital Classroom, make sure that your computer is equipped for running Adobe Illustrator CS4, which you must purchase separately. The minimum system requirements for your computer to eff ectively use the software are listed on the following page.

Table of Contents

Starting Up
Lesson 1: Adobe Illustrator CS4 Jumpstart
Lesson 2: Getting to Know the Workspace
Lesson 3: Illustrator CS4 Essentials
Lesson 4: Adding Color
Lesson 5: Working with the Drawing Tools
Lesson 6: Working with and Formatting Text
Lesson 7: Organizing your Illustrations with Layers
Lesson 8: Working with Symbols
Lesson 9: Using Eff ects and Transparency
Lesson 10: Exporting and Saving Files
Lesson 11: Advanced Blending Techniques
Lesson 12: Illustrator CS4 New Features