Illustrator Portfolios Books

Graphic Design Portfolio Builder is a good supplemental book for designers and beginning students. I wrote supplemental because this book does not comprehensively cover the features of Photoshop and Illustrator software (and it wasn't suppose to) but to help beginners you get familiar with the software and up and running.

The book is very colorful, well laid out and full of useful information. What is comphrehensive is that it covers all aspects of what designers or artists would face and be challenged at work or in classrooms. Each lesson is written by an professional designers and artists with years of experience and I highly enjoyed reading the chapters so far.

The projects in the book are fairly challenging and somewhat time consuming which is good since it makes you explore the software to its full potential if you're feeling ambious.

For inspirations, I recommend you checkout other students work in the book or on their website. It really challenges you to come up with your best work and experiment with different ideas and creative concepts.

PROS:
Easy reading... lots of hands on pratice, which is also worded in an easy to understand language... Comes with a FREE membership to basically a webgroup website, but if you choose to take advantage of the service, the very authors of the book will critique and help you develop your projects, VERY HELPFUL/VERY COOL

CONS:
You have to have photoshop and illustrator in order to take advantage of this product

This book was so very helpful in aiding my desire to build a portfolio! It helped me learn more about Photoshop and Illustrator - plus gave me assignments that were reviewed and critiqued by a very helpful and polite instructor. This is more than just a book it is a full class at a book rate! I would recommend it to anyone looking for this type of work or just to improve what they already know.

[...] The company is centered around on line training in the general area of graphics design. ==This book is designed to go with one of their courses. The goal of this course is to help you create a portfolio of your work. It has a series of projects where you download various components of a project, then you do the project and post your results back on-line. A Sessions instructor will then give you a short critique of your work so you will have specific person to person contact that lets you know how you are progressing. This is kind of like working as a designer and having the client look at what you've done.

As you might well guess from the sub-title, these projects are oriented to Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. This is not exactly a beginners course in these software package. You should have at least some beginning understanding of how to use these packages. The concentration hers is on improving your design skills, not on the details of the software.

Having taught graphic design for the last 13years, I am always looking for material to use as a reference or even text in my classes. This book gives many ideas on projects that students can use to create a quality looking portfolio for that first job interview. Even though I am constantly encouraging my students to go beyond the simple text assignment, many do not. This book my just give them that spark to do just that.

On the job training is the best way to build your professional skills and portfolio. When you first try to break into the job market, you will frequently hear the words "come back when you have some experience". But how do you get that experience, unless you have a job? This book by Gary Poyssick and Erika Kendra is like a mini-internship or summer job at a graphic design firm.

The most impressive part of the book is the project-based approach the authors use to teach Illustrator CS3. As you work through each project, you are given insight into the decision-making, workflow and production aspects most commonly encountered in graphic design. You begin with a discussion of the client and his needs and then peek over the shoulder of the art director as decisions are made at each stage of production from document setup to production ready files. Then you jump into the project with step-by-step instructions and many supporting illustrations.

Of course, Illustrator is a complex software and there is a need to discuss the technical aspects of that software. But the authors handle this very well in special sections called Illustrator Foundations. Just as you would encounter in the workplace if you asked a co-worker to explain something new, they give you just enough information to achieve the project goals without overwhelming you with pages of technical details. Finally, at the end of each chapter is a portfolio project that is a "do it again" assignment.

So what are the projects? Beginning with an easy project to teach the basic Illustrator skills, you create a set of vector-based icons that will be used in several ways by the client. The kitchen planning guide project teaches precision drawing and text formatting. Next is a logo design and identity package which will teach how to create a design to meet printer requirements. The realty map project shows how to use Illustrator libraries to build and manage your design assets which will save hours in production time. Moving on to more challenging projects, you will learn how to design a project with folds and facing/non-facing pages. The cereal box project teaches how to work with die-cut templates supplied by the professional printer and incorporate pre-existing design elements into your artwork such as UPC bar codes. Most companies have a website and they want to be able to use the same artwork across both print and web. The last few projects show how to create designs with this goal in mind.

Gary Poyssick and Erika Kendra are authors and co-authors for many computer arts training materials.