I recently received my upgrade to Adobe Creative Suite 4. After an enormous headache trying to install it, which I might blog about later, I've got it running now and have had a chance to play with some of the tools. Thanks to Adobe TV, I've got access to lots of great tutorial videos. My goal is to replace Microsoft Office with Adobe Creative Suite. Since my work is almost exclusively being done for the web, I'm trying to find something better than MS Office to produce images and charts.
First off, Illustrator. I'm more of an engineer than an artist. I think in terms of flow charts and diagrams. I have yet to find a single Adobe product that can produce a flow chart. With PowerPoint, I can draw boxes, fill them with text and then connect them with arrows or lines. If I move the boxes, the connectors move with them. Illustrator has connectors, but once they have connected the boxes, you can't move the boxes unless you want to leave the connectors behind. That's not a real connector, is it? Argh.
Illustrator is designed much more for the artist than the engineer. Simple flow charts are going to be a pain. It looks like I will have to create the diagrams in PowerPoint and then import them into Illustrator. Ouch.
As I continue to learn Illustrator, I might post some of my results.
Look into Visio or OmniGraffle, they are both intended for producing flow charts. The problem with Illustrator, as you discovered, is that its designed for producing graphics from a very low level graphics.
ReplyDeleteKelly, thanks for the suggestion! I've got Visio and can make do with it, I was just trying to get into the whole Adobe suite and stay within it for all my products. No luck so far.
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