The Non-Designer's Illustrator Book
Category: Books,Arts & Photography,Graphic Design
The Non-Designer's Illustrator Book Details
About the Author Robin Williams is the author of dozens of best-selling and award-winning books, including The Non-Designer’s Presentation Book, The Non-Designer’s Design Book, The Little Mac Book, and so many more. Through her writing, teaching, and seminars, Robin has educated and influenced an entire generation of computer users in the areas of design, typography, presentations, and the Mac. John Tollett has co-authored numerous books with Robin, including Robin Williams Cool Mac Apps, Robin Williams Design Workshop, Mac OS X 10.6 Snow Leopard, and many others. In John’s career as a designer, illustrator, and art director, Adobe Illustrator has been a valuable and favorite creative tool since the very first editon of the program released in 1990. Read more
Reviews
This book is a great introduction to vector-based drawing. Its well-designed presentation covers most of the basics of Illustrator CS5. It's easy to handle while you're working, the paper has a nice feel and the layout is easy on the eyes. Complementing the text are hundreds (literally) of excellent full color illustrations that show at a glance how a tool works, the result of a particular operation, etc. For beginners this book is a great place to start.Unfortunately its scope is so limited that entire areas of the program are left out or only briefly introduced (3D, perspective, creating transparency to name a few). A book for beginners should be limited to the essentials but a fundamental concept like "transparency" i.e. overlapping objects / text should be discussed in depth since it's part of nearly everything created with vectors. It certainly deserves more attention than the one overly-simple example of an opacity mask we get here.But despite its limitations the book offers a simple, well-ordered examination of the most basic uses of Illustrator CS5 and I highly recommend it for that; it's the best book I've seen if you're completely new to vector drawing. For everyone else who's ready to see just how complex (and beautiful) vector art can be I recommend Real World Adobe Illustrator CS5 by Mordy Golding or Sharon Steuer's series of "WOW" books.
