Adobe® CS4 Web Workflows: Building Web Sites With Adobe® Creative Suite® 4

Chapter 11. CRAFTING A FLEXIBLE MARKETING AREA

The top of the Web page is generally recognized as the area having the most impact. It's quite common, therefore, for sites to use that section as a primary and ongoing marketing region. Flash—with its high eye-candy potential—is typically the delivery medium in the end result, but the Adobe Creative Suite 4 Web is designed for other products to form the core elements. As you'll see in this chapter, Illustrator and Photoshop work well together to set up the final eye-catching effect, completed in Flash and displayed via Dreamweaver.

In the following exercises, you'll have a chance to learn to draw complex shapes inIllustrator, integrate that output into Photoshop, and prepare the Photoshop graphics forFlash import. Along the way, you'll learn this core technique in Illustrator:

• Drawing with the Pen tool

And these critical Photoshop techniques:

• Working with Smart Objects

• Merging layers

DRAWING WITH VECTORS

If you had to choose one tool that defined Adobe Illustrator, it would undoubtedly be the Pen tool. Illustrator is known primarily for its ability to produce high-quality illustrations, reproducible at any resolution. The vector paths created by the Pen tool are completely flexible and, because they are vectors rather than pixels, never degrade ...