Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Design Premium All-in-One for Dummies®

Chapter 2. Discovering Illustrator CS4

In This Chapter

• Knowing when to use Illustrator

• Opening and creating documents

• Looking around the Document window

• Checking out the tools and panels

• Changing your view

• Zooming in and out

Adobe Illustrator goes hand in hand with the other Adobe products but serves its own unique purpose. Although Adobe Illustrator can create multiple-page artwork (with artboards), it's not meant to create lengthy documents with repeated headers, footers, and page numbers. Those types of files are more appropriate for applications like InDesign. Typically, you wouldn't create artwork from Illustrator that's made from pixels, such as images edited or created in Photoshop. Illustrator is generally used to create vector logos, illustrations, maps, packages, labels, signage, Web art, and more. (See the sidebar, "Vector graphics", for more information.)

Vector graphics

Vector graphics are made up of lines and curves defined by mathematical objects called vectors. Because the paths (the lines and curves) are defined mathematically, you can move, resize, or change the color of vector objects without losing quality in the graphic.

Vector graphics are resolution-independent; that is, they can be scaled to any size and printed at any resolution without losing detail. On the other hand, bitmap graphics have a predetermined amount of pixels creating them, so you can't scale (resize) them easily — if you scale them smaller, you throw out pixels; if you scale them larger, you end up ...