Resources

SWATCH FILES

Here's a screenshot (Click to enlarge)

• Right-click here and "save link / target as" to get the group swatches
  • Simply download the .ase file, place it somewhere safe, open Illustrator (or Photoshop or InDesign), click the little arrow on the top right corner of your swatch menu, scroll down to "Load Swatches", then "Other Library," then find this swatch library on your computer. Done!

Photoshop is best used for raster production.

• Use Photoshop to manipulate raster images, such as photographs.
• Use Photoshop to extract elements in photographs for use in layered montages, such as renderings.
• Use Photoshop to prepare line-intenstive raster files (like maps from the web) for production work in Illustrator.
  • Many maps we'll use, which we're gathering from places on the web have been flattened in to rasters. Nearly any file you get from the web will be of this nature. Photoshop is useful for 'cleaning up' these line-intensive images, but ultimately your overlays and modifications should then be carried out in Illustator, probably with the ultimate objective of deleting the original base raster file from the final composition.
• Do not use Photoshop for creating or manipulating line drawings. Of course there are always exceptions, and yes, you can produce line-intensive graphics in PShop, but a good analogy here is cooking. Suppose your recipe calls for a cup of chopped onions. You can throw an onion in to a blender to achieve this end. You'll certainly 'chop' the onion, because the blender can function as an onion chopper. However, the results may not be what you hoped for, and there is a tool in your kitchen much more suited to chopping - the simple knife. And so it is with line-intensive files: the better tool for creating / manipulating line files, at least within our workflow, is invariably Illustrator.

Illustrator is best suited to vector production.

• Use Illustrator to create and manipulate line-intensive drawings, such as maps, diagrams, etc.

InDesign is for publication layout.

• InDesign's purpose is to create beautiful publications for web and for print.
• We'll use InDesign to 'weave together' all of the text, charts, graphs, maps, and tables that we produce in to a final publication, which will then be published to paper and to the web.
• We won't use InDesign to manipulate or produce any of the aforementioned components. Many inexperienced graphics people use InDesign to produce line drawings. This approach is a mistake and should be avoided.
  • Why? Because InDesign is built from the ground up to handle multi-page publication layout- magazines, newspapers, brochures, etc. Yes, InDesign indeed contains a few tools to work with line-intensive imagery, but these tools are rudimentary and ultimatley cumbersome compared with Illustrator's capabilities.
  • The analogy here gets back to the onion in the blender: while it's possible, it's far from ideal.