They Liked My Book

I got offi­cial word yes­ter­day that the pub­lish­er liked my pro­pos­al and out­line for an Illustrator CS 2.0 (aka Illustrator 12) how-to book. So, pend­ing my con­ver­sa­tion with the acqui­si­tions edi­tor about con­tract and scheduling–which should­n’t pose any issue at all–I’ll be writ­ing my first book.

As I see it, my main job with this book is to make the graph­ic arts com­mu­ni­ty’s scari­est tool fun and inviting.

Most design­ers know Illustrator has tremen­dous cre­ative pow­er and free­dom that could—and should—be added to their reper­toire, but they do not know how to go about it and Illustrator intim­i­dates them.

Illustrator is scary; it isn’t as intu­itive in even its basic rea­son for exis­tance as Photoshop. Everyone under­stands the con­cept of a pho­to­graph, and even the scant­est of imag­i­na­tions can envi­sion touching-up and oth­er­wise alter­ing a flat image. Raster makes sense. It has a cor­re­la­tion in the real, non-digital world: you run a brush across a pic­ture, col­or applies to the pic­ture; it hap­pens, it’s instant, it’s real.

Vector is dif­fer­ent. It’s math. The very def­i­n­i­tion of vec­tor art­work is off-putting to right-brained cre­atives: A col­lec­tion of points and curves that define a shape. Or, even more intim­i­dat­ing, is the def­i­n­i­tion giv­en by oth­er resources such as Dictionary​.com: “the rep­re­sen­ta­tion of sep­a­rate shapes such as lines, poly­gons and text, and groups of such objects.” To most right-brain cre­atives, not only is that def­i­n­i­tion not as fun and sexy as Photoshop, it is down­right frightening.

The aver­age free­lancer or job seek­er wants to use Illustrator, she just needs to be shown in her own lan­guage that it does make sense, that it is cre­ative, that it is not scary. She wants—and needs—to get past her intim­i­da­tion and reluc­tance and learn to use the prod­uct to get her job done.

Once that fear is elim­i­nat­ed and the essen­tial skills are impart­ed, cre­ative pros will dive head first into explor­ing the aspects of, and uses for, Illustrator.

That’s my ulti­mate goal for the book. I will update you here as I write it (with­out giv­ing away any­thing I should­n’t, of course). And, nat­u­ral­ly, I’ll let you know when it publishes.