Getting started

Adobe Illustrator is vector-based graphic design software available for free to students. It can be extremely useful for creating research posters, as well as designing figures and visualizing concepts. It has fewer constraints than Microsoft products and can result in cleaner, more visually appealing designs. Once you know the basics, it’s also quite simple to use. To get started:

  1. Visit www.adobe.com and select sign in, found in the upper right-hand corner.
  2. Enter your UMail address (i.e., ).
  3. You will be prompted to select the account type. Select Company or School Account.
  4. You will be redirected to a University of Utah login page. Sign in with your CIS password.
  5. On the Adobe home page, select the gridded boxes icon in the upper right-hand corner, next to your user icon. Then select Creative Cloud.
  6. From the menu at the top, navigate to Apps. From here, find the Illustrator application and install. This may take 3-5 minutes.

Key components

When you create a new document in Illustrator (an .ai file), you will see an artboard. This is your workspace. You can create objects outside of the artboard, but any exports will usually be bounded by what is contained within the artboard. In the properties sidebar, you can select the units (usually pixels for digital media, inches for print media). To size your artboard, either select Edit Artboard in the properties sidebar, find the artboard tool in your toolbar, or use Shift+O. Then you can transform the width and height in the properties sidebar.

In an Illustrator file, you create geometric shapes such as points, lines, curves, polygons. These objects (vector objects) are represented by a mathematical function, as opposed to raster graphics, which are represented by grid cells. (Eventually, your vector-based imagery will be exported and rendered to a raster format — but more on that later.) Objects have a fill, stroke, and opacity. Often the opacity is simply 100 percent, with no transparency. Fill and stroke are assigned to swatches, or colors.

All of your objects also exist in three-dimensional space. Recently created objects are closer to the “surface,” and older objects are in a “deeper” layer. For example, if you create a circle and then a square, the circle will be behind the square. When objects are grouped, they exist on the same plane. This will become less abstract when we are hands-on.

Shortcuts

Illustrator tools can be found in the toolbar. As you become more proficient, you may prefer to use shortcuts. These are some of my favorites.

Key Tool
V Select tool
P Pen
I Eyedropper
T Create textbox
M Create rectangle
L Create ellipse
Shift + M Create square
Shift + L Create circle
Cmd + [ Send backward
Cmd + ] Bring forward
Shift + Cmd + [ Send to back
Shift + Cmd + ] Bring to front

Exporting

Rarely will you share an ai file. Occasionally, you may need to share your file in a vector format as a pdf. (In this case, you would “Save As” a pdf.) More often, you will export the ai file to a more usable format, such as a png, jpg, or tif. To export, you navigate to File > Export > Export As. From here, you select the format. Generally you will check “Use Artboards,” which only exports the features within the bounds of the artboard.

Choosing colors

When creating something like a research poster, you should generally choose 2-5 colors to incorporate, in addition to black and white. If you choose two colors, they should be different hues with a similar value. As you incorporate more colors, you may opt for a lighter tint of one hue. A good rule of thumb is to choose 2-3 hues, with 1-2 tints or shades of those hues — the color palette may resemble a set of categorical and continuous color combinations. All colors should be easily distinguishable from each other. One color should be quite dark (white text should be legible over it), so you have a source of contrast.

When implementing your colors, it’s helpful to think of the 60-30-10 rule. One color will likely be your primary color (used 60 percent of the time), another will be secondary (used 30 percent of the time), and another will merely be an accent (used 10 percent of the time). This framework applies even when you have more than three colors. In Palette A, for example, the purples may be our primary colors, the orange secondary, and the yellow an accent.

Choosing colors, the smart way

Rather than creating your color palette from scratch, see what other artists have come up with: https://color.adobe.com/explore. If you find a color palette you like, you can hover over it, save it to your library, and it should appear in the “Libraries” pane in Illustrator within a few seconds.

Color Terminology
Term Definition
Hue Pure color
Tint A hue mixed with white
Shade A hue mixed with black
Tone/Saturation The amount of black and white mixed with a hue
Value The lightness/darkness of a hue

Nice-to-haves

Printing

You can print your poster through University Printing Services or Fedex, but the cheapest way I’ve found to print is through Knowledge Commons in the Marriott Library (about $50 for a standard poster): https://lib.utah.edu/services/copy-print.php#posters

Pro tip: print a TIFF file, rather than a JPEG. TIFFs are lossless, preserving image quality, while JPEGs are lossy and compressed. It takes longer to export, and the file is much larger, but it’s worth the effort.