Adobe Illustrator is often the least used member of the graphic design trinity which also includes InDesign (or QuarkXPress) and Photoshop. Its main use is the creation of print graphics, anything from a corporate logo or a map of directions to your office. It can also be used to build website layouts and web graphics include Flash animations. There are also several functions relating to page layout, such as the ability to link paragraphs of text and run text around images.
Illustrator is often the final member of the Adobe Creative Suite that people will get around to learning. Delegates coming on our Adobe Illustrator training courses will often complain that the program seems less inviting and exciting than Photoshop. And, although Photoshop is a complex package, they find themselves using it for all their graphic work, even things which would much easier to create in Illustrator. Part of this difficulty in getting started with Illustrator is the fact that it often appears to new users that the program is hard work: you create a new file and you're presented with a blank page. You have to create your drawing entirely from scratch.
When we run Illustrator training courses, we accept that our job is not just to show delegates how the program works and how to use its various tools and options. We also need to show them how to get past this idea of the stark blank canvas with nothing on it. There are four main antidotes to Blank Canvas Syndrome. The first is to have a very clear idea of the type of artwork you want to produce with Illustrator. The second is to use the excellent Live Trace facility built into the program. The third technique is to make liberal use of scanned and other bitmapped images as points of reference. And, fourthly, reuse elements that you have already created, both within the same drawing and between different illustrations.
Getting started with Illustrator becomes a lot easier once you have a clear idea of what type of artwork you need to produce. When often run courses for companies who will be using Illustrator in a very specific way, such as fashion companies, architects or cartographers. This type of training tends to be very successful because it's just a case of showing people which tools and techniques they need to use to create the necessary output.
For users who are using the software in a less clear-cut and focused way, we always try to point out on our Adobe Illustrator training courses that you don't have to start with a blank canvas. We always recommend that wherever possible you import relevant graphic material such as scanned images, keep them on a background layer and use various Illustrator tools and techniques to either trace the images or simply to use them as guides and points of reference as you are creating your own original artwork.
Adobe once owned a program called Streamline which was a utility for converting bitmapped images into vectors. Though they have now discontinued it, Streamline lives on in the guise of Illustrator's Live Trace function. This allows you to convert bitmaps imported into Illustrator into vectors, either by choosing one of the preset settings or by creating a custom set of parameters. The program is very fast, so it is easy to experiment with several different settings to see what gives the best results. Once you have got your vectorised version of the artwork, you spend a bit of time cleaning it up and it's good to go.
Bitmapped images can also provide useful visual reference points as you create your own artwork. You place the image on a background layer and, optionally reduce its opacity down to around 45%, so it doesn't clash with the elements you are creating. As you draw, you can then make constant comparisons between your own art and the content of the background reference images.
Another way of getting past Illustrator Blank Canvas Syndrome is to base new elements that you create on elements that already exist within your drawing. The program has a rich range of tools and techniques for doing this. You can create simple copies of an original element and you can also create transformed copies of the original. Illustrator also has the facility of applying multiple attributes to the same object. For example, you can give the same circle, say, five borders rather than creating five overlapping circles.
In short, that blank Illustrator page can soon be filled with lots of funky stuff. The trick is to realise that, once you decide what it is you want to create, your can accelerate the process of drawing by tracing elements from bitmapped images, using images as points of reference and basing new items within your drawing on elements that you've already created. | 
