Paul’s Blog

Adobe Illustrator - the big comeback

We are currently experiencing an enormous interest in Illustrator. People are almost fighting to get onto scheduled courses. It’s a little hard to pinpoint exactly what’s brought this on, but a lot of our clients in the fashion design industry are telling us that it’s now a ‘must have’ skill on your CV, and I’m sure it’s the same story in other areas.

Personally, I think this resurgence is long overdue. Illustrator is often overshadowed by Photoshop, which of course is considered to be the ‘be all and end all’ when it comes to computer graphics. Hold on though. I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve had to tell people on Photoshop courses that they may well be using the wrong program. Try assigning Pantone colours in Photoshop, try drawing a map, or even mocking up a web page, and you’ll know what I mean. Illustrator makes this kind of thing easy, while in Photoshop (much as I love it to death), it can be a struggle.

For example, Illustrator features such as Live Trace & Live Paint save time and effort for people who like to sketch, trace and apply colour fills. Fashion designers can design and use custom patterns, and even create their own personal sketching styles. Package designers can create 3D elements, complete with mapped artwork.

Of course, fundamental features like using the Pen tool to draw Beziér curves, compound shapes and pattern design, are still at the heart of Illustrator, and these are implemented better in Illustrator than in any other program I’ve used.

Illustrator CS3 brings a few new features along, with a new and very comprehensive colour design section, and it certainly does more for screen-based designers, but fundamentally, Illustrator is still all about creating professional artwork, and the freedom to do almost anything you want, as accurately as you want.

Add comment May 16th, 2007

Dreamweaver CS3: Spry Widgets

Dreamweaver CS3 includes the Spry Framework for AJAX: a Javascript library which enables non-programmers to take advantage of various dynamic page elements, effects and XML data access. AJAX stands for “Asynchronous Javascript and XML”. One of the major advantages of AJAX is that data can be requested from the server and utilised without the need to refresh the entire page. This makes for very dynamic, fast and highly interactive pages. Google Maps is based on AJAX.

Although the Spry Framework has been available to download for a while via Adobe Labs, this is aimed mainly at coders. Dreamweaver implements Spry via a new section in the Insert toolbar, and ships with several ‘widgets’; repeating tables, menus, collapsible panels and form validation to name a few. This technology actually delivers really well, is fast and works across browsers. A really nice aspect of this is that it presents a good incentive to begin working with XML data, providing a relatively simple way of accessing the data and using it to populate pages, menus and so on. This provides the possiility of creating ‘dynamic’, data-driven pages without having to use databases and more complex go-between technologies such as PHP, ASP or Coldfusion.

Ubiq’s new Dreamweaver advanced course now includes SPRY widgets and datasets. The course runs over two days, and addiotionally covers adanced CSS page layouts, templates and much more.

I’ve recently built a site for Brittons School in Havering, which make use of Spry for a calendar and other elements: http://www.brittons.havering.sch.uk.

Add comment May 7th, 2007