Mike Gondek reviews Total Training Illustrator CS

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Author

Deke McClelland presents the subject at a perfect pace and is very knowledgeable in Illustrator. He has been writing books as long as I can remember. With over 70 titles in his name, he is a veteran in training on Adobe products.

Yes, you will have to put up with his puns, cheap jokes and the tacky decor of his bachelor pad during the introductions. Deke makes up for it sharing all the essential hidden keyboard modifiers in Illustrator.

His examples not only cover how to use illustrator, but you will also see many of the common problems that professionals regularly encounter.

What You Get

After watching the third DVD, I was wondering if color management, brushes, envelopes would be covered. Found this excellent bonus disk which covered the topics I was looking for. The bonus disk is actually content from the Illustrator 10 total training series, but totally applicable to Illustrator CS.

You also get a DVD with project files, but need version CS to open the files. Intermediate users should be able to do the training without the files, but beginners will more likely want to upgrade to CS if they want to interactively follow along.

Content

Deke covers shapes thoroughly, adds new interest to them and goes over all the hidden secrets. While drawing stars, holding the up arrow cursor will add points to your star or sides to a polygon. Deke covers all these secrets which many Illustrator users have not seen before. He covered most every single one that I spent over a decade learning, and gave me a few new ones. I could only think of a few he skipped such as the tilde key; but that one can be dangerous to teach and more fun than useful.

The scribble filter is in many examples. The scribble filter is great, but would have liked to have a more thorough coverage of prepress issues such as the document raster settings. Many printers are still stuck in version 8, because of the extra raster issues associated with versions higher than 8. Illustrator 8 was a vector only program if you did not place any images and it was easier to make film without error. We need to understand what prepress encounters, and our prepress friends could have used some tips to help get Illustrator CS to work better for them. Embedding images could have been discussed, and I would have done the section on 3D in the wireframe mode as you could better see what the settings do. Illustrator for video and program interactivity was not covered, but flash animations were.

Deke never really slipped in his presentation, which happens to everyone in Illustrator if you have the wrong layer selected a composite path, masking or grouping problem. The coverage of the advanced transparency palette features such difficult topics as knockout groups with an extraordinary presentation.