Adobe Illustrator

I have had several courses on Adobe Illustrator; however, I am more familiar with CS2 than CS3. I have worked with CS3 when I was at my last internship, but I only have the student version of CS2 at home. I found that watching these tutorials was helpful in picking up certain details that they changed with the new version.
I will summarize what the presenters when over in each tutorial. The regular selections tool is for selecting objects and the direct select tool lets you choose anchor points. You are able to select certain anchor points and apply effects for only the selected points if you wish. In order to have all the tools on the screen at once you can tear it off and have the palette with the options available for you. You are able to click on a tool and then click on the page where you want your shape to be. By holding shift this will constrain the proportions. If you hold the option key it will start from the center of where you first clicked. And if you are working with the premade shapes you can use the up and down arrow to adjust how many sides you want your shape to have. The eraser tool can erase only a certain area if you select that object or you can erase anywhere by not selecting anything. With the pen tool you can click and drag for softer edges and you can modify your anchor points the direct select tool. You are able to convert your anchor points to corners or smooth them out. With the pen tool you can use add or delete anchor points. When you are using the brush tool you can adjust the fidelity. With having low fidelity you will create more anchor points as you draw. Or you can change it to high fidelity if you are looking for a more smooth flow with less anchor points. You are also able to adjust the smoothness of marks. Something that I found really interesting was that you are able to rework over paths by having both keep selected and edit selected paths checked. This is something that I would use frequently. This also goes for when you are using the pen tool. By holding shift you can scale objects proportionately. If you double click the scale tool you can change the numbers around and do a preview of what it would look like. If you are using the shear tool and then free transform the object you can distort the objects perspective by holding the command key. There are two types of text; point text and area type. With area type you will see a frame defining it. You can look under options and align the text and add things such as drop shadow. With typing on a path you have starting and ending points. This enables you to control where the text falls. You are able to create different effects while typing on a path.
I am familiar with all of the tools that the presenters went over, however, I did learn a couple new tricks. I found that the presenter in the beginning tutorials was much better than the later ones. I found the speaker in the Point and Type tutorial to be extremely fast and hard to understand. Since I am familiar with most of what was explained I didn’t really find one tutorial more helpful than another, but I was able to pick up different tips that I will use from many of them.
Illustrator is my favorite computer program. I find myself creating drawings and logos often in this program. I feel the hardest thing to do when first using this program is to learn how to control the pen and brush tool to get your anchor points exactly where you want them. With time you are able to pick up on mastering this and incorporating the adding and deleting anchor point tool. One of the best things about Illustrator is that it is vector based and you are able to make objects or type larger or smaller and it won’t look pixilated. We can’t say the same for Photoshop. I remember one of my first mistakes as a beginning designer was creating text in Photoshop and resizing it. We all learn from our mistakes.