emily's notes on topics to cover when teaching illustrator

illustrator-crash-course-topics.md

• Overview of Adobe products and stuff
  • When to use what program
  • What’s a vector graphic? What do the formats mean, etc.
  • Show past fave maps, talk about style guide, the GIS team styles, etc. -Resources: give them fonts, swatches, and some samples to play around on
• Adobe Illustrator interface -Layout -Layers! Turning them on/off, locking, stacking, hide things don’t delete them, best practices for setting up map layers -Border vs. Inside – how the color thingy works -Basic tools
  • Direct vs. indirect select tools
  • Shift and alt + shift
  • Grouping items
  • Rectangle, circles, lines (with dash/dot/weight/arrows), rounding corners
  • Text boxes, weird-shaped text, fonts, character menu
• Pen tool
  • Show them arcs and stuff and make them trace things. Pen tool is the most useful thing in illustrator.
• Other tools
  • Align/spacing
  • Colours (eyedropper, guide, swatches)
  • Opacity
  • Pathfinder (!!!)
  • Clipping masks
• Noun project
• GIS exporting
  • Print composer
  • My method: export map, export scale, screenshot the legend and use the eyedropper to grab colours
  • Labels and how to wrangle them
  • Setting up an Ai file from a QGIS export – best practices
  • Thinking about what the audience needs when you finish the map
  • Shrinking graphics
  • Plotting