Why I love Adobe’s Creative Cloud
Adobe has long set the bar for design and development programs. With their Creative Cloud, you get the suite of programs that are catered towards design and development of everything awesome. This can be designing and changing photos or images with Photoshop or Illustrator, creating wireframes using XD or InDesign and even coding and developing a full website with Dreamweaver. There are even programs for animations and video editing!
Being a web designer (or developer if you prefer), the Adobe Creative Cloud is invaluable and almost necessary to have at your disposal. For this article, I want to focus mainly on why Illustrator and Photoshop are such valuable tools.
Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is such an awesome tool. My first contact with Adobe’s Creative Cloud was with Illustrator so I am more comfortable and familiar with it. That being said, I know that there are still so many things that it can do that I have no idea about. But that is the beauty of everything in the Creative Cloud, each program is constantly being added to and made better. Adobe Illustrator is an awesome tool for designers. It is something that allows the designer to create and recreate, in an easy to use and powerful interface. I have learned to use Illustrator fairly quickly because everything is laid out in such a way that it is all easy to access. Everything is right at your fingertips!
For me, it seemed like Illustrator made it easy to learn how to use it. Granted, there are little nuances and things you need to just know, but I felt like I was able to learn quickly just because of it’s layout. And if you don’t like one type of layout or you are needing a different set of tools at your disposal, there are several layouts that you can choose from to cater to your project.
With everything being at your fingertips, it can be a little daunting at first. So, the way that I learned how to use Illustrator was just by simply, well, using it. The very first assignment that I had in Illustrator was just to make lines, as can be seen in the example to the left. Not great, right? At first I thought that the assignment was pointless but after starting to do it, I realized how valuable it was to my learning. I didn’t know where any of the tools were or what they could do. After repeatedly making simple lines using different tools, I started to understand where the various tools were and what they could do. This mindset, helped me in furthering my understanding of Illustrator as I learned more and more by practice.
Thankfully, as I have practiced, my skills have gotten better. I have been able to make some awesome projects just by using the things that I have learned by working with Illustrator. Something that I found to be very useful to me was creating wireframes for a project that we were asked to do. Though I would now probably use something like InDesign or XD for wireframes, I found it very simple to create wireframes from the information about the project that I had at my disposal. Of course, after creating the wireframes, I was able to easily move on to actual mock ups of the project as seen in the example. This was very easy because of the wireframes that I had already made using Illustrator. All I really had to do was add some color and pictures!
Now, I love how powerful Illustrator’s editing capabilities are. Everything that I can think of to edit, Illustrator has a way to edit it. It is easy to see why it is used by so many people.
Photoshop
Illustrator is a fantastic tool, but in my opinion, there is so much more that you can do with Photoshop. When you hear that someone can edit photos or is a great designer, usually within the same sentence you hear the word Photoshop as well. The layout in Photoshop is very similar to that of Illustrator and so it makes it easy to switch back and forth between the programs. There are a few differences here and there, especially if you like to learn all of the keyboard shortcuts, but it is a very similar experience.
Photoshop gives you so many tools right from the get-go to start editing your project right away. Just getting into Photoshop can be a little overwhelming to first-timers but once you know what the symbols mean and where they can be found, Photoshop is a very powerful program. From removing things that you don’t want in a picture with the clone stamp tool to making multiple layers and layer masks, Photoshop provides everything that a designer could ask for to create beautiful and cool works of art like the one above.
No matter what tool you choose to complete your project, Adobe’s Creative Cloud has a program for you. In web design, Illustrator and Photoshop prove to be some of the most powerful tools that someone can have at their disposal. Creating and editing using these programs is a great experience and one that should be had by every web designer and developer.
Jordan Ashment is a student in the Digital Media program at Utah Valley University, Orem Utah, studying Web & App Development. This article relates to various projects in the Special Topics in Web Design Courses I and II and is representative of the skills learned.
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