[thelist] Adobe Illustrator and Web Graphics

cdj chris at fuzzylizard.com
Sat Mar 23 09:33:00 CST 2002


Illustrator is a Vector based illustration program. All this means is
that it uses mathematical equations to produce the images that you
create. The advantages to this are that the images are completely
scalable to any size and they take up much less disk space.

Photoshop is a Raster based program. This means that there exists a bit
of data for every pixel that exists in the image. This makes the file
sizes larger and you can't scale the images as well either because you
need to create/remove bits of data for every pixel that is modified.

Illustrator is also a little faster to use and I find easier to use
because the objects you place on the screen remain editable, unlike
Photoshop where once something is placed on the image it is more or less
permanent and in order to facilitate any change you need to modify the
pixels.

In terms of answering which package is better for web graphics, that
depends - both are. If you are doing a lot of photo imaging then you
need to have Photoshop on hand. But if you are mostly creating geometric
layouts for your webpage's with only a limited amount of effects then
Illustrator will work just fine.

Personally, my package of choice for creating web graphics is Macromedia
Fireworks. The advantage of this program is that it is a Vector based
drawing app with Raster imaging capabilities. This means that all
objects you place on the screen remain editable and resizable (a big
advantage) while still allowing you to do image manipulation on any
photographs you may need to work with (up to a point). It also has a
fair number of effects that can be applied to objects that are similar
to what you can achieve in Photoshop - glows, drop shadows, bevels, etc.

However, with all that said, if you are doing a lot of photo/image
manipulation then you should probably have Photoshop and Fireworks.

Also, with all that said, Photoshop comes with ImageReady which is
supposed to handle web graphics. I don't use the tool and find it very
counter intuitive to use and therefore can not say anything about it. It
may work, though, for what you are looking for.

--
/chris

<www.fuzzylizard.com>

PS. One trick that I use sometimes is to fire up Illustrator when I am
first trying to come up with a sketch for a website. The speed and
incredible large pasteboard allows me to have multiple ideas all on the
same page and to work very quickly from one idea to the next without
destroying any previous ideas.


-----Original Message-----
> Hello Experts,
> I know some Adobe Photoshop and can create images for web according to

> my need. I have heard about another software Adobe Illustrator for web

> graphics. I am not very familiar to it. Can somebody introduce Adobe
> Illustrator to me and compare it with Adobe Photoshop? What is the
> importance of Adobe Illustrator web graphics? Thank you,
> Syed Zeeshan Haider.
> http://syedzeeshanhaider.faithweb.com/
>





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