Tool for Life

Teaching Adobe Illustrator from Coast to Coast

In my neverending quest to NOT focus on today’s responsibilities, I’ve offered to share what I’ve learned with the next generation.

Captivating a crowd of 12–20 year olds with stories of Nike and Yeezy and Paris and Shanghai isn’t difficult. You don’t even need to bring props because they are usually wearing something you or someone you know designed.

The difficult part is maintaining their interest long enough to teach them something. And teach them something useful.

Seven days a week I use Adobe Illustrator. This software has a monopoly on being the tool for every occasion. It’s the Ace of being the Jack of all trades. You can do everything in Adobe Illustrator except edit music…so far.

Twenty years ago Adobe Illustrator was intimidating for nondigital natives for obvious reasons. You drew with a mouse and you had to understand icons and hot keys. Adobe Photoshop was more like sketching and painting — masterfully incorporating stylus and touch screens to mimic drawing andbrush strokes. Adobe Illustrator was more of a CAD tool.

For those that fine tuned their skills in drawing by hand, a Wacom tablet is a natural alternative to a pen and paper. That’s still intimidating for people who can’t draw. And your final solution is difficult to copy and paste or tech spec or make editable for other users downstream — especially in manufacturing.

Over time Adobe Illustrator imported countless drawing and text features into its already robust toolbox so you ended up with a little of everything. Adobe offers dozens of software tools next to Illustrator that go deep into each creative field — from Photoshop in photography to InDesign for publishing. If there’s a creative outlet, Adobe has you covered.

Adobe Illustrator masterfully skims off the top of every one of these software tools without losing the basic vector manipulation kit needed to build a menu for your favorite restaurant. You simply need to know how to use a mouse and click on icons.

Digital natives are adept to using the mouse and icons are their first language.

So I decided that I wanted to teach middle school and high school students how to get beyond the first layer of Adobe Illustrator because it’s as powerful as learning a second language. It’s a gateway to the other programs and creative fields.

The number of clients who ask me to change a color or a font, move one line in a file or simply open a PDF file in Adobe Illustrator is amazing to me because I think that the tool is so simple to use. And the amount of creative work I’ve been handed that started in Microsoft Word is painful.

So why doesn’t everyone already use Adobe Illustrator?

For starters Adobe Illustrator is not free. People use what they can readily get their hands on. And unless you are very creative with a good eye you’re going to end up with the equivalent of Comic Sans and Clip Art when you use non creative software for creative tasks.

For just a few hundred dollars you can get your hands on the most powerful creative tool on the planet.

But a few hundred dollars for many is easier said than done. Adobe has always known this, so they offer heavy discounts to educators and students.

So I’ve been looking for educational partners with access to the equipment and software to help me pilot a class on the basics of Adobe Illustrator. Thanks to two wonderfully like-minded educators I will be tricking a couple of dozen students into learning how to use Adobe Illustrator as they fumble around their favorite fashion trends.

My two pilot partners couldn’t be further apart — middle schoolers in a private NYC prep school versus Oakland high schoolers turned away from standard public school. But the makeup of the students shouldn’t matter for the Ace of the Jack of all trades.

The curriculum starts with a 4 week course that gets you from starting a new file to changing colors through transparent shading — the shallow end of the pool of Adobe Illustrator, yet 90% of the tools that most creatives use on a daily basis. We will use whatever examples grab the students interest. And if they wish to go deeper we will let them keep joining the class to go deeper into each menu list.

I went to high school in Ohio with the Assistant Principal of the school in Oakland. When I told him what I wanted to do he immediately compared it to the drafting class we took in our high school 30 years ago. In 16 weeks we learned a skill that we could have turned into a job. A real job.

For some of these students, Adobe Illustrator will be one of many of the tools at their disposal. If we do this correctly a few of these students will be using Adobe Illustrator seven days a week.

Good things.