To: Professor Solberg
Date: 3/13/12
Re: First progress Report for capstone project
So far, the majority of the work that I’ve been doing has been watching tutorials on the basic tools in Illustrator. I’ve written down some directions on basic stuff like:
- creating and saving new documents
- the pencil tools
- the selection tools
- the type tools
- the rectangle/shape tools
- the gradient tool
- the crop and eraser tools
- the fill and stroke indicators
I’m currently working on a module about graphs: how to make them and insert them. I’m also writing a module on the brushes panel.
I’m still pretty unsure how the manual is going to be structured. I’m not sure how I’m going to separate the material, since there is so much to include. I guess I’m mostly just overwhelmed at the amount of stuff that you can do with Illustrator, and I’m not sure what I want to include. I know that I want to do a “beginner/intermediate” manual, so I think I want to structure the TOC like this:
- Getting started: creating and saving new files, adjusting your workspace, using templates
- Lines: Brush tool, pencil tool, tracing tool, pen tool
- Creating shapes: geometric objects
- Color: Fill & Stroke, color settings, pallets, gradient, transparency
- Layers: The layers panel, creating layers, deleting layers
- Effects and Filters: Using effects, using filters, applying effects and filters, editing an applied effect, rasterizing objects
- Printing and exporting: General print options, output options, saving as a PDF, exporting files to Adobe Photoshop
So that’s what I’ve got so far…I think I might want to go a little more in depth, but I’m searching around for other stuff that might fit within the content that I already have.
Hooray for bulleted lists!
You’re right about the scope of Illustrator — would it help if you chose one particular illustration (or type of illustration) and designed the manual around that? Like, you include an illustration of X in the introduction, and the rest of the manual is mods that give you the skills to create X, and all of your screenshots use different parts of the process of making X? Or you could focus on a particular purpose and aesthetic — e.g., technical line drawings (e.g., like you’d see in instructions for an IKEA shelf or an iPod) or graphic art like you’d find in a graphic novel? You’d have to think through the implications of that, but it might be one way to focus things … Whatever you decide, the mods you list above seem like good basics.
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