Illustration Made Easy: Spice Up Your Presentation with Illustrator CS2

By Jerry Short, art director, LASN

Adobe Illustrator CS2 is the latest version in the creative standard program for graphic illustration.

Illustration has always been an important aspect for all landscape architects. Adobe Illustrator Creative Suite 2 offers new ways to create great presentations.

Landscape architecture firms have used Illustrator for years to create to graphics to enhance their presentations. Most firms are probably still using Illustrator 8-10 which is fine for their needs. So why would a company consider moving up to Illustrator CS2 version then? Simply better productivity allows them to create illustrations from sketches in seconds, improved user interfaces, and the ability to work with other programs like Photoshop and InDesign to create a total graphic package.

Live Trace and Live Paint

These are two tools which will allow a Landscape Architect to create illustrations from hand drawn notes in minutes. Simply scan your image and, after saving it to your computer, open that image in illustrator. Illustrator will read both tiff and jpeg images with no problems. Select the drawing in Illustrator and click the live trace button and the drawing is converted into a fully editable vector image. By using the Live Paint button the drawing is expanded and, with a few adjustments with the endpoints, it is ready for color. There is no stacking order as in older versions. New edges are created from overlapping objects. Just click in the desired area and add the color.

Live Trace allows you to convert hand-drawn images or photographs into a fully editable illustrations in seconds.

Another feature of live trace is the ability to bring in regular photographs and convert them to illustrations. There are several options which allow the image to be converted into a high or low fidelity photo image with comic format, technical or ink drawings as but a few options. The photo can be converted into gray scale or color, and even the amount of color can be controlled, along with the palette(s) from which the color is chosen. Live Trace and Live Paint will decrease the time needed to complete illustrations which in turn will increase the productivity of any firm

By using Live Trace you can transform a regular photograph into a editable illustration with a host of options such as choice of color palettes, number of colors, blur and styles to create a custom image. Blur was added to the image to give it an impressionist feel.

Live Paint is designed to allow artwork to be painted quickly without having to create multiple layers just to add colors. Live Paint can also be used to add color to photographs converted by Live Trace or existing art work.

Control Palette

The control palette has been improved allowing access to character and paragraph attributes as well as fill, stroke, and opacity from the palette as opposed to having to open up several windows on the screen as on older versions of Illustrator.

The control panels have been updated to provide for better user interface. Instead of having several windows open, text and picture options can be found in drop down windows from the control palette.

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3D Modeling and other Effects

Simple 3D modeling is a snap with Illustrator CS2. Create any shape from text to an image, and under the effects drop down menu in the control palette, choose the 3D section and the control panel shown in the example will pop up. The amount of 3D effect applied to the object can be adjusted with a few simple controls. To observe the effect, check the preview box. The Effects Gallery is presented in the same format as Photoshop. This gallery allows access to all the style effects that can be applied to the image such as, graphic pen, water color, torn edges, etc.

Another tool which will be useful to the Landscape Architect is the 3D Modeling Tool. With this tool, any shape created in Illustrator can be converted into a three dimensional image with the use of simple controls shown above.

Conclusion

Illustrator CS2 will provide any landscape architectural firm with a powerful tool to spice up their presentations. Illustrator CS2, in conjunction with Photoshop CS2 which allows for Illustrator images to be used without rasterization, InDesign to put all the elements together, the Adobe Creative Suite CS2 enables any firm to present professional proposals.

This tool should look familiar to all Photoshop users. In Illustrator CS2 you can access an Effects Gallery which has access to all the image effects in the same format window as Photoshop.