With creativity being at the heart of graphic design, creative technology comes in handy for everyday work. Imagine if all of your favorite memes were hand drawn and then digitized - there would be many less GIFs in the world!
Adobe Illustrator is an indispensable tool for Graphic Designers. In fact, it’s often listed on job descriptions as a requirement alongside Photoshop and InDesign.
A few common tasks within the graphic design industry are logos, icons, business branding, infographics, posters, and flyers.
Logos & Icons
Think of some of the biggest brands you know - McDonald’s, Starbucks, Walmart, Google. They all have a specific set of logos and icons representing their business. These graphics represent the business and make it easily recognizable for customers.
Logos and icons are particularly important to business development because they appear everywhere. On websites, social media, promotional materials, and anything else you might come across for the company. Icons even live in places you probably don’t think much about such as your computer’s desktop or your phone’s home screen. You see the image and immediately make the connection to the business and what it does.
One of the best places to design these types of graphics is in Adobe Illustrator because of the vector graphic aspect—any drawing created in Illustrator can scale to whatever size you need without having to guess or save multiple files. Perfect for billboards or cell phones.
Business Branding
While logos and icons are an important part of a brand, there’s more to it than that. When you see the logo or icon, you make the connection about what the company is. It seems simple, but in order to create this recognition, many elements must be working correctly behind the scenes.
Within branding, there are specific colors, or a color palette, each business uses. Some use color psychology to make their brand feel a specific way. Others feel a strong connection to colors and their traditional meanings. Either way, these colors play into how you recognize a brand as much as their icons.
Similarly, typography plays a large role in brands as well. The way a font looks - whether it’s serif or non-serif, beautiful script, plain text, or even a fun theme - it’s all designed to make you convey the values and mission of the brand.
Illustrator is one of the most helpful tools for creating brand elements like color palette and typography because of the customization available. Graphic designers have the ability to play with brand colors and save them in the library for easy access on the next project. They can also hand draw or design fonts and Illustrator will vectorize it and turn it into sharp, clear text. There’s also a massive stock of Adobe fonts available, which leaves no shortage of options for creating the perfect branding package for any business.
Infographics
Infographics are visually pleasing and share information in a logical way that the viewer can understand. Whether explaining numbers and statistics or a specific progression of information, their purpose is to capture the audience’s attention and inform them in a palatable way.
Graphic designers are often in charge of creating these assets because they have an eye for the artistic, but are used to explaining concepts with a combination of visual & text elements.
Illustrator provides a great place to design infographics not just because of the vector graphics aspect (which makes it easy to size logos and branding), but also because there are a lot of features to draw directly into the program and have it translated into a clean digital form. It is, after all, a program designed for illustration (there are almost 90 tools specifically for illustration purposes!), so the artwork capabilities are quite advanced.
Posters & Flyers
Picture the last poster you bought. Maybe it was a band you love or a piece of famous artwork. Or maybe it was something silly like a giraffe riding a shark (you never know what you might find on Amazon).
Posters and their smaller cousins, flyers, have been around for what seems like an eternity. If you’ve visited your local coffee shop or library, you’ve probably seen them more recently than you even realize. These highly designed pieces of art can entertain or inform - sometimes both. They typically inspire you, often to take action. Perhaps you see a flyer for guitar lessons and call the number. Or you see a poster about a local book club and decide to check it out.
With so much power to illustrate, work with typography, and play with color, Illustrator makes these projects fun for Graphic Designers to work on. They can create any type of lettering, make any sort of cute animal to draw your attention, and all of it is vector art, which means if they want or need, they can make it bigger or smaller at will.
Where to Learn Illustrator for Graphic Design Skills
If you’re in love with the idea of graphic design, or just want to add some fun new skills to your resume, there are plenty of places to begin learning.
Noble Desktop offers several options for in-person, live online, and certificate learning options. Popular Illustrator courses include Illustrator in a Day and Adobe Illustrator Bootcamp. If you’re looking to grow your skills in a short period of time, Illustrator in a Day could be an ideal option. For a longer, more foundational look at the program, Adobe Illustrator Bootcamp might be what you need.
If you’re interested in graphic design courses and certificates, Noble has those, too. The 78-hour Graphic Design Certificate, which includes training on Adobe Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, is a great place to begin getting a baseline knowledge of the programs you’ll need in a career as a Graphic Designer. In addition, there’s a Graphic Design Portfolio Bootcamp that focuses on providing projects you can use to showcase your skills to potential employers and/or clients.
If you’re not quite sure you want to be in the classroom, don’t worry - the classes are offered live online as well as in-person so you can choose to learn where you’re most comfortable.