Adobe Illustrator CC - Ultimate Training Course

Excellent course. Daniel explains everything in a manner that is clear and easy to understand although there is a huge amount of content to remember! Excellent value for money and highly recommended.

The course is well organized and easy to understand. I have learned a lot. Daniel is an outstanding instructor. I have taken Daniel’s logo design class as well. During the Q&A sessions, he makes sure you understand the full concept to deliver a professional looking project. Highly recommended.

No assumptions were made and no esoteric jargon was used. Straight forward example, definition, demonstration, repeated for better learning retention.

So far I’m enjoying the class. I’m very new to this but have trouble seeing the details on my mobile device.

This was an excellent Illustrator course. Everyone who wants to learn Illustrator should take this one.

I just finished the last lecture of the course. I have learned a fair amount about several topics in Illustrator I wasn't aware of and I definitely believe my overall knowledge of the software has improved. [Course Largest Negative Aspect] However, I'm not really satisfied with the pedagogical approach of the majority of the lessons. There is a huge disproportion between the software features demonstration lessons, and the actual practice project exercises. Most of the lessons aren't proper actual practice exercises or assignments. Very sadly, these are very rare (only around 10%). The course is excessively loaded with software feature demonstrations instead (around 90%). This vast disproportion really let me down. I was expecting much much more practice-guided exercises; those with a well-defined starting and finish point, where you are given instructions, a goal, and you can try it out for yourself within the context of a somewhat real mini-project. Ideally, a course should have at the very least 50% of these practice-guided exercises and 50% of feature demonstration at most. But again, this one has only 10% of the first type, and 90% of the second type. In fact, for the sake of precision, here I list the only actual hands-on proper practice exercise lessons there are (in contrast with software feature demonstration lessons): * 5 Assignments: Flourish Design, Spy Symbol, Mountain Tracing, Character Distort * (1) Layer Arrangement of Cartoon Face * (1) Pen Tool Drawing Template * (1) Wreath with Pattern Brushes * (1) Puppet Warp Showdown Exercise * (1) Music Themed Pattern Creation * (1) Live Paint Bucket Tiles Activity * (1) Gradient Mesh Chili * (1) Gradient Mesh Egg As you can see, there are only 13 lessons consisting of actual hands-on proper practice exercises/mini-projects. Only 13 out of 130! Literally, just 10%. Now, don't take me wrong. These few lectures were absolutely great. The really helped me to consolidate my knowledge in their respective topics. My complaint is that there were too few of them. The course was loaded with conceptual demonstration of features, which are far from my preferred style of learning. I understand these are still somewhat useful and that it is perfectly fine to have 30% - 40% of these types of lectures, especially when introducing a topic for the first time. But the great flaw of the course is trying to cover as much as possible of a single topic with this conceptual demonstration style, and then slamming on the brakes and consider the topic covered without any single actual mini-project or practice exercise. For instance, there were three straight sections about Type (12-14) where pretty much all the lectures were conceptual demonstrations of features of the software. The only lecture that got somewhat close to being considered an actual real-world hands-on mini-project was the second to last one in the third section (Creating Outlines - Part 2). Those sections were very conceptually heavy and unengaging. I had to take lots of notes and screenshots as a way of studying to try to consolidate the knowledge in the long run because of the lack of hands-on mini-project activities. There should have been at least two separate activities for each topic apart from the demonstration lecture. Unfortunately, out of dozens of topics included in the course, only two met this condition: The Pen Tool had two practice separate well-defined exercises (a Drawing Template, and the Spy Symbol), and so did the Gradient Mesh (the Chili and Eggs activities). However, for such an important tool like the Pen Tool, there should have been much more, from 5 to 10 exercises increasing in difficulty and mastering not only lines, but also complex curves including corner, cusp, and smooth points. I wish the structure of the lectures covering the Gradient Mesh was everywhere else in the course: 1. An introductory lecture with finished samples to understand what the tool was about and what could be achieved with it (not mentioning each and every single feature, parameter and fields yet). 2. A second detailed low-paced lecture on how to use the tool to make an actual hands-on (not sandbox demonstration) mini-project, discovering the features, parameters, and options within the tool as the need for it raised). 3. A third lecture consisting of a well-defined assignment to try on our own, with a fast-paced recording of how the instructor approached it and his final result. This structure was absolutely great. I had taken another Illustrator course and it didn't cover the Gradient Mesh at all, and with this simple but hands-on lessons structure I feel that I got some intermediate mastery of the Gradient Mesh Tool. It is a shame that it took the instructor 120 lectures to shape this structure. It should have been implemented for every single topic as soon as the Basics section was finished. Now, I feel like that Daniel was perfectly capable of offering much more hands-on real-world mini-projects. In fact, he has already created several more lectures of this style in other environments. In fact, in his YouTube channel, he has at least three videos that fit this style perfectly: Recreating the Twitter Logo, the NBC Logo, and the Beats by Dre Logo. On the other hand, I'm enrolled in his Logo Design for Beginners course, which has fortunately much more practical activity-like content than this one, and the serpent tracing exercise with the Pen Tool, which was included in the Introducing Illustrator section, was really great. He should have collected his type of videos and have included them right away (in their proper place) in this Illustrator Course. Additionally, there were several missed opportunities to create hands-on mini-projects. For instance: * We should have drawn together as a project the barbells from the sketch in the Sketching for Illustrator lecture; but instead, it seemed like this was only meant to be watched because even the sketch by itself was missing as a resource file. * Then, in the very same section, he advised not to use the Image Trace tool on a Tribal Mask symbol, but rather recreate it from scratch. There should have been a lecture tracing manually from scratch then (but instead, he just finished the section abruptly). * In the brushes introduction section, we were presented with a few hand-lettering style eye-catching projects as reference. And then... we made neither of them. He just changed topics once the Calligraphic Brushes conceptual features were covered. [Course Positive Aspects] Now, despite this huge flaw, there are several positive aspects within the course that would be unfair for me not to acknowledge: * There's a fair amount of planning put into the structure of the course. The topics are properly grouped by nature, and are usually laid out in increasing difficulty order. * There's a good amount of planning put into the actual recordings. It seems that he has a very defined and clear script and he follows it carefully. This also resulted in a very good, fluent, and polished narration. * The course is very recent and updated. You can follow along perfectly with the newest version of Illustrator without getting lost because it's pretty much the same interface. The title explicitly states that this is Illustrator 2021, and it is completely true and deserved. In contrast, for example, I've seen courses with titles such as "Illustrator 2022 Masterclass", and this claim is completely false. Such course was recorded, I'd guess, around 2017; and then inserted out-of-context bulk patches at the end of the course with the new features; rather than going back and re-recording all the key lectures with topics that were related with these new features, in their proper place. Daniel's course, on the other hand, is a genuine Illustrator 2021 course. * It covers lots of topics. This is the other side of the same coin regarding the big flaw of the course described above. Though I would have preferred fewer topics to be covered in exchange for more practical guided real-world activities, I must admit that I did learn about several topics I had no idea of, even after having completed previously two different Illustrator Beginners courses (one at Udemy, and one in another platform). For instance, in those other two courses topics covered in Daniel's course, such as the Spiral Tool, Opacity Masks, Live Paint, Envelope Distort, Type Styles, SVG Fonts, 3D Type, Perspective Drawing, the Blend Tool, Recolor Artwork and Gradient Mesh; weren't even mentioned. * Despite the excessive amount of conceptual feature demonstrations, there weren't raw theory slides-based lectures. At least all the lectures (except a very minor couple of exceptions in the introduction, which is completely understandable) were recorded directly in the software, which is something positive I should highlight. * The quizzes at the end of each lecture were great. I've followed around 10 long courses now on Udemy, and most instructors, if not all of them; completely ignore and skip the creation of quizzes. And while definitely, it is far away from having actual real-life mini-projects, it is still a nice touch. Additionally, in general, the questions quizzes made perfect sense; in contrast to some quizzes of other instructors where pretty much any answer is correct and you were forced to pick the answer to happened to be the preferred by the instructor (and therefore resulting in quizzes not adding any value). I also appreciate taking the time to create quizzes in almost every single section. * Daniel definitely has a wide knowledge of the software and he surely reflects that he has years of practical experience. You can tell right away that he is no recent intermediate user with only practical knowledge on very limited specific topics. * He is very responsive in the Questions & Answers section. I believe that the hasn't been any single question left answered by him so far. Though I personally didn't make a question in this very course, I have made a couple of questions in another course from him (Logo Design for Beginners), and has responded always pretty soon. [Course Minor Negative Aspects] * During the second half of the course, there were several lectures where the resources were missing. It was weird because these lectures seemed to be more rushed as if they were meant to be only for watching purposes, however, most of these were long and thorough enough that there would have been much much better to have the resource to follow along. I believe Daniel held himself because some of these weren't his own and he acquired them from Stock sites; however, he should have simply picked a free vector downloadable resource and offered a link where to find it so that we were able to follow along. The missing resources I would have liked were: * Section 9 Working with Images: Placing Images, Sketching for Illustrator, Image Quality for Tracing, Live Trace * Section 12 Type Characters and Paragraphs: Text Wrap, Spell Checking * Section 14 Type Form [Missing Font Family and Link]: Touch Type, Warp Text, Type on a Path, 3D Type, Images in Text * Section 14 Type Form [Missing Resource Files]: Images in Text * Section 16 Advanced Functions: Perspective Drawing [Part 2] * Section 17 Colour: Swatches, Gradients, Gradient Mesh [Part 1] * Section 18 Saving and Exporting: Saving for Print, Saving for Web, Export for Screens, CC Libraries, Saving a Package * There was no scaling in the UI. This is perfectly fine if you're working on your own on a large screen with 1080px height or more; but if you are recording it, you have to absolutely consider that people use laptops and even tablets to watch these types of courses, where the height is just about 700px. Occasionally, the edit of the video zoomed in with a magnifying glass; but this isn't enough. I recently bought a 1080px height screen but I couldn't see the icons clearly unless I was in full-screen mode. And watching in full-screen mode is a huge pain, because it makes it very uncomfortable to constantly switch to the Illustrator App and other tabs in the browser. This has nothing to do with the Udemy streaming system because I always made sure it was set at 1080p. So when I watch using theater mode, the video height is roughly 900-1000px and it makes everything blurry. If I had been watching this on my laptop, even in the incredibly painful full-screen mode and even with the best resolution video setting, I wouldn't have been able to see the icons and settings across the inputs in the interface properly. Scaling up (to the higher setting) the user interface through the Preferences window is an absolute must. Please watch your own course on a 760px height tablet in theater default mode (not the annoying and highly restrictive full-screen mode) to experience and understand the pain of extremely small icons and values in the interface. * As a Logo Designer with several years of experience, I expected a significant emphasis on the Illustrator-related side of logo creation. However, there wasn't any sort of emphasis on logo techniques. The only lecture to have ever come close to approaching a real-world logo execution project technique, was the one called Creating Outlines - Part 2. Apart from that, ... pretty much nothing. * There is a complete absence of large-scale projects real-world. Not even a single one. There is neither a full logo tracing project, nor a package design project, nor a book cover, nor a social media post, nor an illustration tracing from a stock site, nor a set of icons for an app or website, nor a presentation template. [Suggestions for Improvement] * Using free downloadable vector resources as tracing exercises, either done through a recording or given as off-screen assignments with visual steps as a guide; and attaching the source inside an own PDF document as a resource file along with the instructions. * I would split the course into two courses: Fundamentals and Advanced (or any other couple of similar terms). Since this course is about 12 hours long, I would keep just 6 hours of content and migrate the other 6 hours to the advanced one. And once I had done that, I would properly collect, plan, design and structure 6 hours of practical real-world mini-projects or activities to reinforce the topics preserved in the Fundamentals course. I would include the tracing or recreation of three or four real-life mid-scaled projects, such as a logo, a set of icons, a presentation template, or a full illustration like the ones found on stock sites. * Incorporate very positive aspects of his own Logo Design Course that went surprisingly missing in this Illustrator course; such as going through the process of the planning, mind-mapping, mood-board, and rough sketching within the context of one project; creation of mini-projects from scratch, font family exploration, and styling within the context of a type-based or logo project, and tracing of more complex illustrations or sketches. * If I had to guess, it seems to me that he got inspired from Martin Perhiniak's Illustrator Masterclass course structure, which as I understand is the best-selling Illustrator course here in Udemy. I haven't enrolled in this myself but I have a friend who has and he pretty much claims that that course has the same big flaw (the excessive amount of conceptual demonstrations in contrast with the low amount of actual well-defined assignments). This Illustrator Masterclass is structured more for preparing the students to pass an Adobe Certification Exam rather than tackling real-world Illustrator projects; and unfortunately, the same applies to Daniel Evans' Illustrator course. He should have picked a couple of few more courses as a reference. For instance, I had previously enrolled in Daniel's Scott Illustrator Essentials Training course, and this course is much much more project-oriented and it is a perfect guide of what the instructor (Daniel Evans) should have aimed at instead, in order to create a much better, engaging and satisfying content.

Each functionality is reviewed in detail and Daniel give us plenty of tips along the way. The pace of the course allow each one to easily follow and experiment at the same time. Moreover, each lesson is clearly named so one can return to the course as needed. Great value there! I highly recommend this course to anyone wanting to learn how to use Adobe Illustrator.

You advertised it as Adobe Illustrator CC 2021 but you're actually using 2019 or 2020 in some videos. There seem to be differences which make it difficult to follow along.

This course is phenomenal! I am totally satisfied. super high-quality content. If someone wants to become a successful illustrator guy, then this course is the right choice. Highly recommended.

Daniels course has given me the confidence to explore all other tools and features and now I’m creating work that is so much more superior! The lessons are presented with total clarity.  I thoroughly recommend this course to beginners and current Illustrator users who want to expand their skillset.  Like me, you’re sure to be developing graphics (and text!) far beyond what you were capable of previously.  Illustrator actually IS easy when you are shown how!

Daniel Evans's teaching style is awesome. This course teaches and explains all the essentials of adobe illustrator with much detail. Thank you for the course.

I learned a lot from this course, so direct and concise in every tool. I was surprised that I was missing a lot of techniques for creating a design. I recommend this course If you want some fresh idea to learn more about the tools that would make your workflow efficient.

Great course, very insightful and complete! It's as if Daniel takes you by the hand and shows you the whole interface step by step. The lessons are well paced, super easy to understand and with in-depth explanations and examples for each option. So this is a very enjoyable and comfortable way to learn. The course is well structured so it's easy to find the lesson about a specific topic. That makes it also useful as a reference even after mastering Illustrator, to look up a certain feature that maybe you don't use so often. Thanks a lot!