Scrapbooking with Illustrator
Scrapbooking has long been a family pastime, especially with young families, since scrapbooks can create a document and timeline of a family's journey. Like all documents, paper scrapbooks are giving way to digital scrap books. With scrapbooking, it's not necessarily a choice to convert to digital documents, as many of the items that often wind up in scrapbooks are no longer produced in hard copies, such as photographs. Adobe's Illustrator program is a professional graphics editor, often used to design logos. It is a very high-end program that may be overkill for hobby use and it is not a layout program, which is better suited for scrap-booking, but it can be used.
Other People Are Reading
-
Adobe Family
-
Before making an investment in Illustrator, you should understand its place in the Adobe lineup. Adobe Illustrator is among a family of graphics and publishing software developed by Adobe. The primary and original members of the family are Photoshop, PageMaker and Illustrator. Conceptually, you can think of PageMaker as a layout program or container in which you pour content, such as type, photos and graphics. The text could come from any text program which PageMaker can digitally typeset. The graphics are designed ideally from Photoshop for digital photos and Illustrator for graphic arts, which are line art, clip art and more sophisticated graphics. The Adobe publishing tools are now formally bundled into a creative suite, Adobe CS5.
Illustrator
-
While Illustrator developed as a type-setting tool by a typography company -- Adobe, the rise of the Internet and digital documents sent Illustrator in a different direction. Illustrator has evolved into a web publishing platform. It is this direction shift that makes Illustrator a viable digital scrap-booking tool.
-
Digital Publishing
-
Illustrator has the capability to edit photographs and a variety of graphics. It has outstanding capabilities for creating graphics and custom type. Current iterations of Illustrator can output digital content for the Internet or to a portable document format (PDF) file. These are its biggest assets for use in digital scrapbooking.
Vector vs. Bitmaps and Layouts
-
Illustrator remains at its heart a vector graphics program which allows for graphic manipulation that professional logo designers or font designers use. This may not be a key capability for scrapbooking, so you'll probably be paying for functionality you won't use -- if you're only planning to do scrapbooking. If, however, you see scrapbooking as a means to get acquainted with state of the art digital publishing tools, including the bitmap world of Photoshop and Adobe's current CS5 layout tool, InDesign, then buying the entire suite will give you a great deal of digital scrapbooking horsepower.
-
References
Resources
- Photo Credit Jupiterimages/Comstock/Getty Images
