What is Illustrator’s role when designing a website
Overview
Daniel Scott
Founder of Bring Your Own Laptop & Chief Instructor
instructorI discovered the world of design as an art student when I stumbled upon a lab full of green & blue iMac G3’s. My initial curiosity around using the computer to create ‘art’ developed into a full-blown passion, eventually leading me to become a digital designer and founder of Bring Your Own Laptop.
Sharing and teaching are a huge part of who I am. As a certified Adobe instructor, I've had the honor of winning multiple Adobe teaching awards at their annual MAX conference. I see Bring Your Own Laptop as the supportive community I wished for when I was first starting out and intimidated by design. Through teaching, I hope to bring others along for the ride and empower my students to bring their stories, labors of love, and art into the world.
True to my Kiwi roots, I've lived in many places, and currently, I reside in Ireland with my wife and kids.
So, what is Illustrator's role in this whole business? As a web designer you might decide you finish at the limits of where Illustrator stops, and what you'd be expected to do-- say you're the designer, you'd have to work with the developer, or a web designer, somebody who does the HTML in CSS, because Illustrator itself doesn't actually make websites; it designs it, the look and feel, gets everything in the right position, the colors, the fonts, and we use that as a template to build that in code.
That's where you might finish. You might just hand over at the end here. If I was your web designer I'd be expecting a bunch of jpegs, pngs, and svgs, so just images, and I'd be wanting you to tell me what fonts they are, what colors they are, what the sizes are, what the color boxes are, how far they're away from each other; I'll be wanting that stuff. And that comes from you to me, as CSS. And we'll look in this course how that is made.
You might decide to go on a bit further, and you want to do the whole web design process. What I'll do is, I'll turn this particular design that we're making here in Illustrator, we'll actually build it in Dreamweaver as well just to make it a nice complete series so if you are more print based, and you just want to stay that side, Illustrator is where you finish, but if you want to move on a little bit more, and maybe get a little introduction to codes, maybe not scary as you think, I hope, you'll move into something like Dreamweaver and build out the full site in that; so that is the role of Illustrator.