Illustrator CS3 Tutorials

These are quick and dirty tutorials designed to get you up and running quickly. More refined tutorials will follow.

Grossmont High School teacher Eileen Mandell has some great Illustrator tutorials on her site.

Intro to Illustrator

RGB or CMYK? | Saving a Workspace | Pen Tool 101 | Selections 101 | Curves with the Pen Tool | Rectangle, Oval, and Pathfinder | The Expand Command | Stacking Order | Move and Transform Again | Star, Polygon, and Keyboard Shortcut | Adding Points and Modifying Shapes | Don't do This | Flare Tool | Lines and Arcs and Spirals, Oh My! | To Click or Double-Click? (Curves with the Brush Tool) | Path Eraser Tool | Eraser and Knife Tool |

Illustrator Basics and Drawing Tools

New Document and Screen Mode Options | Panels, Saving Workspaces, and Help | Changing System Preferences | Where and How to Work (Learn to Scroll and Zoom In or Out with the Shortcuts) | The Rectangle Tool & Stroke and Fill | Stacking Order (The Z Axis) | The Bounding Box, Preview, and Outline| Modifications (Fill and Stroke) | Modifications (Size and Rotation) | Black and White Arrow (Thanks Deke!) |Modifications (Size and Shape) | Under the Rectangle Tool (The Evil that is the Flare Tool) | The Power of the Up and Down Arrows | The Power of the Click | The White Arrow Revisited | The Pencil Tool (Seemingly Useless) | The Pencil Tool (Madman Makes it an Incredible Drawing Tool!) | The Power of the Pencil Tool | Under the Pencil Tool | Smooth Tool Preferences | The Line Tool | Under the Line Tool | Warp, Twirl, Pucker, and the Rest of these Oddities | The Brush Tool (What's the Big Deal?) | The Brush Tool Panel | The Best Eraser Ever Invented! | The Extremely Basic Pen Tool Intro | Gradients Made Hard | Gradients Made Easy

Basic Shapes

What You'll Build | Rotating and Scaling | Aligning Objects | Eyedropper | Duplicating

Text in Illustrator

Text 101 | Kerning and Tracking and Leading, Oh My! | Panels and Comparisons | The 3 Minute Logo (in text only) | Saving Files

Text in Illustrator—Two Line LogoType

Project Preview | Default Text | Saving Files | Leading | Tracking | Upper and Lower Case | Changing Font Weight, Color, etc. | Finishing Touches | The Challenge (or "Assignment" if you prefer)

The Pen Tool

Download Pen Tool exercise folder: Pen Tool Exercises | Pen Tool Tutorials: Exercise 1 | Exercise 2 | Exercise 3a | Exercise 3b | Exercise 4 | Exercise 5 | Right-click to save: Pen Tool Cheat Sheet | Right-click to save: Illustrated Self-Portrait | Freestyle Academy Student Examples