Exploring Illustrator CS2 [With CDROM]

I use Adobe After Effects. I needed to get up to speed on basic Illustrator in order to "feed" vector graphics to AE. Although I have only had this book for a short while ... it allowed me to get to that point very quickly. I am finding it fun to read and am astonished by what Illustator CS2 can do. There is some leaning towards "learning by doing this exercise exactly as we tell you" with excercises ... (which I am not fond of) ... but it does help if you are a beginner (like me). I bought this book along with "Adobe Illustrator CS2 How-Tos: 100 Essential Techniques" and found that to be a great complimentary book. Highly recomended.

Exploring Illustrator CS2 has been a great resource for me. I'm a web developer and definitely NOT a graphic artist. I'm proficient in Photoshop for my needs but occasionally need to do work in Illustrator and always feel like I'm lost. This book gave me a grounding in the overall process of using the software. While it uses a tutorial/lesson approach, it performs well as a how-to resource for specific tasks. I always take it out before I start any work in Illustrator.

Purely for the digital artwork, the book will be a pleasure to some readers. Certainly, the artwork is impressive. But the point of the book is how you can also aspire to creating such output using Illustrator CS2. The emphasis on the book is on treating the reader as an artist, rather than as a computer programmer. It explains the many powerful techniques available to you. But you can and should treat these purely as a means to instantiating your efforts. The book shows that Adobe has gone to some lengths to make very complex to implement methods be as simple as possible to use. The text also covers both making digital images for the Web and for hardcopy. Illustrator handles both well.