Preserved Topic: Brand spankin' new illustrator tut (Page 1 of 1)

OK I've tried to do a tutorial that uses lots of different techniques in illustrator and at the same time do an eye for a friend of mine's flash site. Please post your reactions to this. BTW this is only number 3, I'm still trying to figure out how to make things usable for the widest audience without being redundant

Me Again?

OK. I love sounding stupid, so...Being a total newbie at Illustrator, I can be really good at it .

The problems I have with your tut are as follows:
1)When you describe a process, you seem to take the position that we already know how the tools work. If we already know, we prolly won`t be reading the tut. ( i.e. step 2 "Click and drag out control points from the anchor point. " Which tool do you use to do this ? and how do you select the control points ? If you just click and drag, the whole path moves..I had to read another tut to find out.
2) Step 3 How do you select more than one path to intersect with the path finder ?
3) Step 5.. Where did all those colors come from ?
4)step 6.. how did you get the linear gradient tool to make those radial lookin gradients ?
5) Step 8 is a bad time to find out what is supposed to be on which layer and where the layers are supposed to be.
6) The path you draw in step 9 is very similar to the one shown in step 4. Are they the same one ?
7) the tool you have selected in the screen shot in step 10 ( Blend tool ) appears to be the group selection tool ...

and your spelling sucks. Nice result, but sorry, I`m more confused now then when I started.
If you`re gonna write a tutorial, ya gotta explain what`s goin on , and how ya got there.



Everybody has the right to no taste

Ouch ... not so docile tonight, huh? For the record, no, it is the blend tool in step 10 DB!

I learn a lot from your tutes, but then I do know a fair bit about Illustrator, so maybe the level you are directing your tutes at is more towards 'advanced' than 'beginner'. Was that what you were intending? If so, than great, if not, than you might want to think about going way back to the basics... because I knew that you were using the pen tool, but those that are unfamiliar to Illustrator, or those that are more knowledgeable in Photoshop might get confused, because there are more basic drawing tools in Photoshop... but them also some newbies don't know the difference between vector and bitmapped, etc., blah blah blah....

But hey, I have no major complaints, I am happy! Blending!!! I have been using blends for shapes rather than color/gradient blending, DUH! I hate using the gradient mesh tool/expand fill, why was I not using blends?!?

But then again, if you wanted to write a tutorial about how to use gradient meshs (sp? meshes?) without going insane....

Keep up the good work!

DB comments are helpful, I got a sense of frustration from him, and that is not what a tut is about. I have made a few tweeks to the tut as a result of his comments. I moved the Layers lesson up a bit, added more picts of the tools selected and went into more detail regarding gradients. (in my defense, objects on layers in illustrator remain independent, so they can be rearranged at any point in the drawing process and I added a bit about how to do that)
I was hoping for a tut that a beginner could use. Most of my readers are familiar with photoshop, but know very little about illustrator, so some things don't need much explaining, while other (like layers) may seem be confusing to ps users.
Sorry, lotiss, about the frustrations with the gradient mesh tool, but I feel the same way. Don't expect any tuts for that from me anytime soon. It's a great tool but difficult to control (at least for me)

Me Again?

Ok, I have been looking for a tutorial for the latest Illustrator, but have had no luck in finding one at my noob level. I have never used it and would like to in order to create some graphics that dont have all that pixelation as when you make an image in PS... I will check out the tut.. if anyone knows of any other tuts, please let me know


Visual SUN Studios
www.visualsun.ws

I feel for you JedArt. Writing a tut for Illustrator has got to be difficult.(Adobe still can't get it right). I get frustrated teaching Illustrator (or its evil twin Freehand) to newbies at work all the time.

Illustrator has a bit of a learning curve for beginers. I think it may even be tougher than Photoshop to learn.(I could be wrong, I was a photojournalist for 5 years so photoshop is as natural as breathing to me) I think your tut was pretty good but you might have to over-explain things for beginners. What may seem obvious to you may not be so clear to them.

also i try to avoid using blended gradients (color blends with the shape tool) in Flash. Flash tends to bring in the blend as individual shapes which bloats the file size and can also decrease performence.

that's my 2 cents anyway

tikigod



[This message has been edited by tikigod (edited 11-09-2001).]

Thanks for the 2 cents tikigod . I'm new to flash and I didn't realize the blend/file size problem. I'm not sure if flash will render the gaussian blur either. My first swf file was 5 megs, ok for the cd I distrubuted it on but BAD for the web

Me Again?