As designers, we all know what Adobe Illustrator is, but in case there is someone who doesn’t, Adobe Illustrator is a software application program developed by Adobe Inc designed for artworks, illustrations, and create drawings using windows or any other compatible operating system. It is continuously updated periodically in versions.
After announcing last year the launching of the Illustrator’s iPad version to users, the company, on October 20, 2020, parted the curtain off the latest version Adobe Illustrator CC 2021, version 25 both for iPad and desktop with sets of amazing new features to keep designers up point.
Web designers, just like any other graphic designers, and professional illustrators mostly use Adobe Illustrator CC for their artworks and UX & UI Designs. As such, they are very much interested in the new features newly offered to make their design work less tedious and much alluring.
Basic Adobe Illustrator Use Cases.
Adobe Illustrator is a powerful and diversified software application in the graphics world. It is engineered to perform the following:
- Adobe illustrator is commonly used to create charts, cartoons, illustrations, company logos in printed and digital form.
- It is used to import images, and the image is used as a guide to trace an object in the picture.
- It can be used to recolor and make a sketch-like appearance of a picture.
- Illustrator is a potential tool used to create posters, postcards, and other visual designs that use text and images because the feature is permitting the user to manipulate text in many ways.
- With the ability to play around with text in many forms, it is useful and easy for designers to create text logos.
- Adobe Illustrator is also used in designing mock-ups. This shows how the website will look like when it’s completed.
- It is also used to create icons used within apps or websites.
How Adobe Illustrator helps in Web Design
Compared to Adobe Photoshop, which is used for graphic design, most web designers favorably use Adobe illustrator for designing their web page layouts and app layouts.
The following are some reasons why Adobe illustrator is important in web design.
1. Drawing Any Object
With this software application, using the mesh tool and gradient tool, you can draw any object, and the image will look as realistic as the real object. The drawing portrays a smooth surface and subtle shades with the help of the mesh and gradient tools.
2. Creating Aesthetic Logos
You can create the basic shapes for your logos with the help of the pen tool. Adobe illustrators also give the designer the choice of colors that could be applied to other designs and logos.
3. Resizes images without compromising the Quality
Illustrator enables you to scale and resize your graphic designed image without losing the quality of the image. The picture’s details are always apparent and don’t get distorted so that no matter how large your photo is, it renders it in the best resolution.
4. Draw information graphics
Illustrator also helps the web designer with the feature to correctly draw and present information or statistical data in the form of pie charts, bar charts, tables, etc., that are published in newspapers, posters, magazines, etc.
5. Creates 3D Graphics
Since a good website is one with fine and color images, adobe illustrators don’t lack help to achieve this. It enables you with its 3D function to get good numbers of cool shapes that can make your web design lovely and classic.
Benefits of using adobe illustrator for web design
Even though other designers prefer Photoshop in their web designs, adobe illustrator is still the best for many because of additional features it performs which are in detail not found in Photoshop.
The following are the benefits of using adobe illustrators for Web design.
1. It is completely scalable
Working with Adobe Illustrator, you are resolution-independent; that is, you have no resolution issues in your design. Here, the graphics are not based on stored pixels but instead based on mathematics equations. Due to this, you are giving crisp, and sharp lines printed ready in any dimension. When designing with graphics through this program, you never lose resolution and have much flexibility in your various multimedia designs.
2. It creates files in manageable sizes
Using Adobe illustrators, there are no problems of difficulty to transfer files, but rather transfers of files are quite easy because it creates relatively small files. You can easily share them by emailing them as attachments. Synchronization of files with the cloud and sharing them through a service like Dropbox is fast and less time-wasting.
3. It works on almost any computer system
Adobe Illustrator works almost hitch-free on every computer system. This implies that many persons can benefit from this graphics application software.
4. It creates print graphics and web graphics
Adobe Illustrator enables you to create print-ready graphics and web graphics with ease. It works perfectly with any screen resolution. It also allows you to professionally create with ease vector graphics with tools set that is updated continuously.
5. Makes No Problem with SVG, PNG, GIF, JPG
Adobe illustrator being a vector tool, web contents can be optimized in graphics format in SVG, PNG, GIF, or JPG graphics formats. SVG is easy to create and is the vector for the Web. SVG is fantastic for designing a responsive site and its content due to its ease in creation.
6. Hosted and Icon Fonts
Adobe Illustrator CC means it’s part of the Creative Cloud. Being part of the creative cloud, subscribers have access to the Type kit tool library. Therefore, your Illustrator designs and websites can benefit from the whole library of hosted fonts.
What is new in Adobe illustrator 2021 for web designers
They are a few interesting new features that Adobe illustrator 2021 brings to its users. It is worth noting that the company has on the same verge after a similar release for Photoshop for iPad has taken the veil off the IPad version for Adobe Illustrator. The features here, too, are fantastic to ease and make web designers work more alluring. Let us now look at these new features both on the desktop and iPad versions.
Adobe Illustrator for desktop
1. Recolor Artwork
Adobe Illustrator is now able to sample colors from placed photographs and recolor your artwork. The process is straightforward. Just follow the route Edit > Edit Colors > Recolor Artwork, such that your artwork is matched to the picture and recolored.
2. Enhanced cloud documents; Text Size Handling
In the 2021 illustrator version, there is a new possibility to set up text size. This is done by clicking on the menu button around the character panel and selecting the menu Show Font Height Options list. This enables you to set the current text frame, the capitals’ height, or the x-height. Compared to the manual manipulation in the preceding versions, to match the size of your text to the graphics sets the sizes in pixels.
3. Align text
Being already experienced in InDesign, you can also now in adobe illustrator 2021 set text to align to the middle of the bottom of an area text box, the top, or to be justified within it vertically.
4. Snap to glyph
Using smart glyph guides, you can easily position text and other objects precisely around the live text boundary.
Adobe Illustrator for iPad
This is the first-ever version of illustrators for iPads. Comparatively between illustrator for desktop and illustrator for iPad for this year’s release, more credits go to the iPad version due to the extensive features, which the desktop version doesn’t. These features include:
1. Combining shapes
The combined Shapes panel is the equivalent of Illustrator’s Pathfinder panel. Unlike the desktop version, which shows you icons for each tool, the iPad version offers previews of what will exactly happen to your selected artwork. The Shape Builder is found at the top of the Combine Shapes panel and does its job of combining images when you choose an object and drag over two other items.
2. Adding color
The Color panel enables you to select colors using a standard color wheel or numerically add by values. Also, It makes possible the ability to add transparency, as well.
3. Merging objects
With the combining shape panel, we can unify two separate objects as one object. The great function here is that, even though the two items are merged, they can be edited independently.
4. The Eraser tool
Dragging the eraser tool over an object deletes that portion of the item. In this version, the roundness and angle of the tool can be set at will. Note that in case you have 3 objects, the tool erases it as if it was a single object.
5. Text handling
With Adobe Illustrator on the iPad grants you access to a wide range of fonts, and many other fonts can be added at will using the Creative Cloud app from the Adobe Fonts collection. You get full control over kerning, tracking, size, and leading. All these are possible using on-screen controls through the Properties panel.
6. Repeat Patterns
The Repeat panel enables you to produce grid, radial, and mirror transformations on selected artwork. The object here is turned into a radial array just with a single tap on the Radial button.
7. Working with layers
Selection is easy to make since when you open each layer, the Layers panel displays each of the objects within that layer, enabling us to see the constituent part of the artwork.
It can be believed that the adobe company invested more time on the iPad version because we see a good number of new features. The designer must possess both of these versions to benefit from these additional new features that save time.
Wrapping Up
The web design industry is constantly evolving and as designers, we must always be on top of our game learning new skills and improving our quality of service. As you now know all about Adobe Illustrator 2021 and how you can use it in your web designing process, you now have a very valuable skill at your disposal to offer clients that will increase the value of your web design service overall.
Also, there may be instances that you will need to design something for a web design client that includes some personal information about them. For example a picture of them with contact information. In this instance, you must always be aware of privacy policies that come under web design to avoid any privacy issues with the client.
Author Bio
My name is Anjana Wickramaratne and I am a senior web developer at Inspirenix Web Design Sri Lanka. I am also a content writer with a genuine interest to give knowledge back to the web design community.
Email:wickramaratneanjana@gmail.com
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