Week 1- Outside the Classroom

Our homework this weekend for Digital Theory and Skills was to watch two videos about Adobe Illustrator. The first one, "Touring the Interface," was about the layout of Illustrator and where everything is located. The speaker started in the top left and worked his way down and across the screen. First he briefly talked about the menu bar and then the control panel then went into more detail about the tools panel, explaining how the tools panels is divided into little sub-sections and what each of those sections is and contains. After that, the speaker worked his way over to the panel system on the right of the Illustrator page and talked about the importance of these panels.

The second video, "Understanding Vector Graphics," explains how artwork in vector format is better when working with art that will need to be scaled. The speaker explained and demonstrated that, if one is creating a piece of artwork in Illustrator, which is resolution independent, they can scale this piece larger or smaller without ruining the quality of the work, unlike Photoshop which is limited in its output size and quality when not working with an image taken from an outside source. Vector formatting is better for work that will be scaled in the future because it is made up of math formulas, not pixels, that allow scaling without losing any quality in the image.

Both of these videos were extremely helpful and very informative, I believe I will view more of these informational videos on Illustrator to help further my understanding.

Week 1B

Today in class we had an introduction on the different keys and commands on a Mac keyboard. The shortcuts we went over are going to be extremely useful once we start working with Illustrator and Photoshop more. We also went over the different file sizes like Byte, Kilobyte, Megabyte, and Gigabyte, and different file formats, such as .doc (Microsoft Word document), .rtf (Rich Text Format), .ai (Adobe Illustrator Document), and .psd (Photoshop document). After going over these notes, we got to work with Illustrator. We had a pretty easy in-class assignment, we just had to create an interesting composition on a standard size Illustrator canvas using only 100 black circles. I was not quite sure what to do at first so I just started out making sure I had 100 black circles and practiced the different key commands. I finally got an idea as to how I wanted my piece to look and got to work. After a little I realized it was not working out the way I wanted it to so instead of starting over I just worked with what I had. At the end, this is what I created:

 I believe my piece works well because it has an interesting composition. It is not symmetrical but is still balanced and I feel the overlapping lines help create a sense of depth.

I have never worked with Illustrator before but I feel like I picked up this assignment pretty quickly and I am happy with what I created. I am very excited to see what else we can do in Illustrator and what neat designs I can create using it.

Week 1A

Today was the first day of Digital Theory and Skills. Our professor introduced himself and we went around the room to introduce ourselves to him and everyone else. After that we sent Professor Pannafino our gmail addresses in order for him to send us the syllabus and class requirement papers. We went over the course syllabus and class requirements and talked about this semester. Once we did that, we then had to open up the Student Contract Form in Illustrator and fill it out, then had to email that to him as well. This gave me a chance to get a feel for illustrator which was nice since I have never used it before. I am very excited to see what we will be doing in this class and gaining more experience with editing software.