Learn Adobe Illustrator: All the Basics for Beginners

Published in Design

A few weeks ago we published a post, Learn Photoshop, that included links to well over 100 resources for mastering the basics of Photoshop and the use of the various tools. In response to reader request, we’re publishing this post to help designers who want to get started with Adobe Illustrator, or maybe just sharpen their existing skills.

Illustrator is a powerful program, but it can be overwhelming or confusing at times, simply because of everything that is possible. If you’re new to Illustrator, taking the time to understand the basics and how to use the specific tools will go a long way towards setting you up for success. In this post we’ve categorized more than 100 resources that will teach you everything you need to learn.

For more Illustrator tutorials please see:

Published March 28th, 2010 by Steven Snell

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51 Responses

Christiane Beauregard March 29th, 2010

Check out what could be done with Adobe Illustrator by looking at illustrators

Shanna March 29th, 2010

Wow! this is just AWESOME! Thanks so much for this resource list.

Linda van Rosmalen March 29th, 2010

Friggin’ awesome list. Let the fun commence! Thanks Peeps!

Dzinepress March 29th, 2010

amazing training program you describe in one page, really helping. thanks

Fruitful Fusion March 29th, 2010

Thank you! Thank you! Thank you!

Ross March 29th, 2010

Waow,

once again an amazing post!

Thanks for sharing

Web Guru March 29th, 2010

With the increasing use of illustrations in web development and more of my curiosity for illustrations, this was just the right article for me. thanks a ton.

aledesign.it March 29th, 2010

Fantastic this post. Really useful. Great!

Adam | Toronto Web Development March 29th, 2010

Again, another amazing list of resources for everyone using Illustrator.

Anonymous March 29th, 2010

Illustrator is very useful in this case. Good post by the way.

Petr Mishin March 30th, 2010

Omg! Its very very cool Thanks

James Ballard April 1st, 2010

While not in the order I would like them to be from beginner to capable, the tuts are great!

Vandelay Website Design April 1st, 2010

James,
I thought it would be helpful to keep things categorized by particular topics rather than going in order of what’s most appropriate for beginners. In my opinion, ordering like that would be pretty subjective. Anyway, sorry it’s not exactly how you would like, but I’m glad it’s helpful to you.

Melinda April 3rd, 2010

Thanks so much for all the recent tutorial posts – hours of fun and I don’t know where to start!

Raju April 4th, 2010

A long & informative post. It will help me a lot. Thanks for sharing.

el terminali April 5th, 2010

ı am using corel bu ı want to learn Illustrator, thanks this tutorial, ı hope so ı will learn Illustrator soon )

Sensiz Yaşayamam Dizisi April 5th, 2010

Omg! Its very very cool thank…………..

Adrian | IOM Web Design April 8th, 2010

Great Post,

I’ve bookmarked this and shall be returning. I’m a bit of a novice in regards to illustrator as I spend far too long on photoshop. Been meaning to get to grasp with the ins and out of illustrator for a while now and this should be a big help.

Thanks V Much )

Gerard Syms April 11th, 2010

Thanks! Terrific post you’ve blessed us with! I myself am really now getting into Illustrator and Photoshop and this’ll be a great bookmark. I’m wondering about something though: is this site related to BlogSpoonGraphics in any way? I bookmarked a remarkably similar post a couple of months ago, and I could be wrong here, but I’ve had the impression that the two blogs are related somehow.

Won’t mind if this is cleared up for me.

Anyhow, continue the wonderful job and best wishes to you all!

Thanks again!

Vandelay Website Design April 12th, 2010

Gerard,
No, there is no relation to blog.spoongraphics.

Vintarah August 1st, 2010

Again one great post!

I’ve been trying to learn Illustrator for quite some time now. This post will surely help a lot. Thank you very much.

Cheers!

Reverse Look Phone August 2nd, 2010

It’s true, whenever i’m on adobe, i’m always having difficulty with what effects to use their so many to the point where i use up too many then the picture gets all ugly. These are helpful tips too.

wien October 4th, 2010

great post, thank u for sharing

NL Schober October 8th, 2010

Excellent and timely. I’m currently struggling to learn Adobe Illustrator from Classroom in a Book and this will be very helpful

usman olly November 5th, 2010

wooww i love ai , amazing thank’s v much

Calgary web design November 16th, 2010

Thanks a lot for the valuable info on AI. Although we’re more of a web shop, we use AI often for some of the traditional clients.

Brett Widmann December 16th, 2010

I’ve been working with illustrator for awhile but this article is definitely great for beginners.

Bryan Richey December 29th, 2010

Awesome post. I am relatively new to Illustrator and have been blogging my progress in learning about Illustrator as a way to keep notes online for me to reference anywhere. I will definitely be referring back to this post frequently. Thanks.

sean January 20th, 2011

hey how much time will it take to learn illustrator moderately ? i am a complete beginner but do know about illustrator

Vandelay Website Design January 21st, 2011

Sean,
It depends on how you go about learning it and what resources your using to help. Getting started with the basics isn’t too bad, but there are tons of things to learn and lots of tools to master.

Almekhlafi Abdulsalam February 7th, 2011

Thankyou very much.
This learning very important for professionalism Adobe illustrator

thankyou again

Jenny February 17th, 2011

Thanks for the Keyboard Illustrator Shortcuts.

Vijay Kumar Maurya February 22nd, 2011

Thanks for sharing this collection.

Joy March 21st, 2011

Thanks, for these real life projects.

CaturThoms March 31st, 2011

thank you, for all tutorials…

Elijah Nitcher May 19th, 2011

With havin so much content and articles do you ever run into any issues of plagorism or copyright violation? My blog has a lot of exclusive content I’ve either written myself or outsourced but it looks like a lot of it is popping it up all over the internet without my permission. Do you know any methods to help stop content from being ripped off? I’d really appreciate it.

Vandelay Website Design May 19th, 2011

Elijah,
Yes, it happens several times every day. I don’t really do much to stop it anymore, but you could send an email to the site owner. If you don’t get a response from that you can contact their web host, or if they have advertisers on their site you can contact the ad network or advertiser as some of them have policies against re-publishing copyright protected content.

Gabriel Ryan July 19th, 2011

Really a wonderful notes to develop and motivate our self to learn illustrator. Thanks for sharing this useful information! Hope that you will continue with the kind of stuff you are doing.

Betsy September 27th, 2011

Wow!!! Wow!!! Awesome and timely post…. Thanks a lot….

Michelle November 2nd, 2011

Thank you SO very much!! Just what I needed having melted my brain trying to learn from Classroom in a book – talk about frustrating and un-user-friendly! Looking forward to getting stuck into these.

John Delton April 4th, 2012

hey thanks for presenting such a great knowledge of basics of adobe illustrator…

Ruburn August 14th, 2012

Thank you SO much for putting this together!

Orla Cahill January 29th, 2013

Wow! Fantastic set of tutorials. I’m just starting to learn Illustrator CS5 and I can’t imagine I’d ever need to look elsewhere for learning this software. Looks like everything I’d ever need to learn is all here. Thank you for putting this together.

Learn Adobe Illustrator: All the Basics for Beginners

Basic Intro to Illustrator and the User Interface:

Magic Wand Tool:

Brushes:

Scribbles:

Patterns:

Pen and Pencil Tools:

Transform:

Symbols:

Type Tool and Text Effects:

Layers:

Blend Tool:

3D:

Shapes:

Pathfinder:

Live Trace:

Selections:

Gradient Mesh:

Clipping Paths, Clipping Masks, and Opacity Masks:

Colors:

Productivity:

Lines:

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