Course description

Illustrator is the tool designers use for logos, icons and illustrations that stay sharp at any size, from a website favicon to a shop sign. It can feel strange at first, especially the Pen tool. This course takes you through it one step at a time, so you can draw clean vector artwork with confidence and send out files that work on screen and in print.

It's a full course, not a quick tour. There are 10 sections and 50 written lessons, and every lesson ends with a hands-on task on practice files made for the course. You follow the owner of a small refill shop learning Illustrator for her business. She builds her first icon from simple shapes, traces her own sketch with the Pen tool, sets up her brand colours, designs a wordmark, turns an ink drawing into a tote bag print, and sends label files to a printer. Every section has a worksheet, answers, a cheat sheet and ready-made guides and checklists.

What you'll learn

• The basics: vectors and pixels, the workspace, documents, artboards, units and colour modes, and a safe way to save your work.
• Shapes: drawing, selecting, aligning, grouping and combining shapes with the Shape Builder and Pathfinder.
• The Pen tool: anchor points and handles, smooth curves, editing paths and tracing a sketch.
• Colour and type: global swatches, brand palettes, gradients, recolouring, contrast, fonts and wordmarks.
• Illustration: brushes, layers, Image Trace, patterns and symbols.
• Logos: from sketches to a vector logo in full, stacked, icon-only and one-colour versions, plus a simple brand sheet.
• Output: AI, PDF and SVG files, exporting for screens, print files with bleed, checking proofs, and copyright and trade marks.

Who it's for

Complete beginners using the desktop version of Adobe Illustrator on Windows or a Mac. It ends with a final project: your own logo in four versions, a matching icon set and a tidy pack of files ready to hand over.

What will I learn?

• Find your way round Illustrator and set up documents and artboards for screen or print
• Draw, select, align and combine shapes to build clean icons
• Draw and edit smooth paths with the Pen tool and trace your own sketches
• Build a brand colour palette with global swatches and check colour contrast
• Set and style type, and design a simple wordmark
• Turn your own drawings into vector artwork with brushes and Image Trace
• Design a small business logo in full, stacked, icon-only and one-colour versions
• Export SVG, PNG and print-ready PDF files with bleed, and hand over tidy files

Frequently asked questions