Getting Hired as a Graphic Designer - Become an Adobe Illustrator Certified Professional

welcome everyone I'm just waiting for the stream to make sure that it's going smoothly uh let me just double check back it should be working fine so if you're joining today uh on this live stream please use the chat to let me know where you are joining from and uh also please let me know if everything is working fine the sound and the uh screen that I'm sharing I have one of my illustrations on the screen at the moment which I am going to talk about but I have lots of other interesting illustrations here prepared these are all from one of my recent courses that I created uh all of these illustrations were created in Adobe Illustrator using some interesting techniques some that has been around for a while some that's a bit based on newer features and uh this live stream is going to be covering quite a lot of things I am aiming to show you some technical stuff that can be useful um some techniques that you can apply to your work but we will also talk about whether it's worth investing your time and effort and money into uh getting certified as an Adobe Illustrator user with the only currently available option the Adobe certified professional exam and this is something that we talked about last week as well there we were discussing the same thing about Photoshop now we will talk a little bit about this uh with illustrator and uh besides that I will also show a couple of features specifically about generative AI within illustrator and whether these are making any change or difference um in our workflow as a graphic designer or illustrator and whether we should be worried uh that these features will eventually take over what we do so yeah that's pretty much what I would like this live stream to be the dat dedicated to but as always the main reason that I'm doing these live streams is because I would like to interact with you guys so if you use the chat feel free to ask questions along the way I will keep an eye out and try to answer as quickly as I can and as much of the questions as I can so yeah feel free to um ask anything about illustrator or anything uh about illustration or or illustration or graphic design in general now first of all I wanted to mention that this stream is sponsored by Ben q and I want to mention that this is the screen that I'm currently using but I have been using BenQ monitors for a long time the 3225 U or PD 3225 U is just really an exceptional Monitor and and I'm not saying this because I'm an ambassador I'm saying this honestly because I've tried so many other screens and uh I find this to be the most reliable in terms of colors and in terms of accuracy um really I tested uh this compared to the previous model that I've been using side by side there is a video on our Channel about that so you can actually see it for yourself it's just crazy how much it improved um compared to something that I already thought was outstanding so it's mainly thanks to the new um IPS black panel that they are using so here's a just an example they are showing of the original IPS panel that they had and then the new one how much extra contrast TW it has twice as much contrast in it um and uh also in general just just so much uh better covering all the cover uh the color P spaces and sorry if I'm sounding a bit bad I just had a um flu this week I'm just coming out of it I thought I don't want to delay this uh live stream because uh I I thought we we can still host it um yeah just sorry for for the way I speak it might be a little bit um hard to hard to understand okay so the certification is uh something that you can find here so there's more information about it here I'm just going to pop this in the chat as well so everyone can easily find it so that's the official link um graphic design and illustration uh exam using Adobe Illustrator and this is the currently only available option um that you have if you want to get certified and I talked about this last time whether um this makes a big difference when you're applying for jobs or when you are actually let's just say already working in an agency or as a freelancer and the main conclusion is that it's not going to be a like a deal breaker you it's not something that you must have but it's definitely not going to uh um hold you back or it's an advantage to have and U but this shouldn't be the the main focus of um of like getting started in this career so normally what I say is practice makes perfect you have to really practice a lot and um and especially generate work create work that uh that will demonstrate your skills and your understanding of core principles so what does that mean so for instance if I wanted to present my work I want to apply for an illustration uh a job where illustration Vector illustration is important important I would demonstrate my skill mainly by showing the examples on my screen so I would show the variety of styles that I can do um I would show the type of projects that I worked on and if you haven't actually worked on real projects you can always come up with projects yourself as so in terms of a creative portfolio it doesn't really matter whether you created something for a real client or not the only main difference from uh an employees uh part employer's point of view so for instance if I am hiring someone is that if I see that they work for an actual brand I know that they are not only good with the work that they created but they must have been able to communicate with the client that they went through all the necessary like legal steps that they need uh like knowing how to uh use an NDA um and and and all the additional things that comes into uh question when you when you work with someone in this field so having no actual experience in the industry but having some amazing illustrations is already an amazing start so this is just something you have to be very clear about if you work on um madeup projects so personal projects that you just created for fun um and make it look like it was for a client you have to always be very clear When you mention this in your portfolio that this is not for a real client it's a a madeup project a passion project that you created um and this is the reason why you chose this topic so make sure that you are always clear about that and in that case um people will understand what it is and they will be able to judge your work based on that so for instance this was also created for uh my illustrate a fast track course which is supposed to be for a um this slightly Japanese inspired version of the Little Red Riding Hood uh story and this could be the cover of the the book and uh yeah again this is not for a client it's not an actual real book but I could easily show this in a mockup that would make it look like it's an actual final printed product but I would never like Li about saying that this was actually printed and it's it's on the shelves somewhere because that's not true so that's also something you have to be very careful about if you are showing these very realistic mockups you have to make it clear that this is just a visual uh just a way to present the work um and um it's not to be mistaken uh that this is not an actual final uh printed or manufactured product so the um the the the main point I'm saying here is that even if you don't have experience in the industry the first thing that will really set you apart in the industry is the portfolio your creative portfolio so the amount of work you have but more importantly the quality of work that you have so for instance if I had to choose to present some of my illustrations I would probably choose examples that are varied in style but also really the best of my work so I wouldn't feature anything that I'm not 100% about or I feel like I would be able to do that better if I if if I worked on it um right now so so yeah really just feature the best work that you you you created um and that's usually most most of the time your most recent work however that shouldn't fool you because I I fell into this trap a couple of times that whenever I work on something I'm very excited about it and then after a couple of weeks when things settle and with a fresh eye I go back and look at it I actually realized that it's not as good as maybe some of my older work that I've done before so you should before uploading straight away to your portfolio your most recent projects you should always let it rest a bit wait a couple of weeks and only after that if you're still really happy and excited about it then you can up upload it to your portfolio having said that the worst thing that you can do is that you don't you you you just stop updating your portfolio um that's one thing that I actually ended up falling into this mistake myself many times even right now it's just because most of the time uh I'm busy working on courses I I just forget to update my portfolio but that's a very very bad habit so keep paying attention to keeping your portfolio fresh and something that really has to represent you artistically um I'm going to get back to the the question soon I just try to go through this train of thoughts that I have here so one other question that I often get from my students is that as a graphic designer do we have to be good at illustration because it sounds like a like a connected skill but is it a requirement uh for every gra graphic designer to be able to do illustrations of course it is not it's a very useful uh skill that I would say is almost like complement skill so it will improve the quality of work that you can create because you won't have to rely on stock assets uh or you won't have to rely on generated vectors because now that's also a thing thanks to Adobe Illustrator um but um but yeah necessary the most importantly the illustration skill uh is something that is a great complimentary skill for every graphic designer but there is a difference between being able to do an illustration that is Artistic or really like illustrative that could be used like an editor in an editorial um um like in a magazine um using it together with an U or being part of the style of the article or maybe I'm I mean like in a in a book for instance or on a poster compared to things that are more functional so you can still use adob illustrator for more functional things that are more abstract or shape based that doesn't require that high amount of artistic skills so yeah the examples I'm just switching over here in the background you can see that I experiment most of the time with these uh like various styles that uh just interest me or that I like and mainly just to test out some techniques and and features I'm just going to make my uh myself a little bit smaller here just so I don't take up so much space on the screen um and yeah let me just get back to some of your questions uh before I move uh go any further um yeah so there is one question about whether an iMac display is better than any other monitor I actually am using an iMac Pro connected and connected to that I have this BQ monitor that I mentioned earlier um and my iMac is the secondary monitor so that's that's just like there on the side like right now I'm using it for the uh live streaming um setup and I'm reading the comments from there but my the work that I do is actually I I have all the main Adobe applications on the banku monitor so I trust the colors of this screen way more than what the iMac Pro uh can create or what what what it can be calibrated to so in terms of calibration as well the bank Q is far more Superior and that's something that I've tested many times I've done many prints uh where I could tell that the soft proofing that I was doing on my banku screen came out much better than what I've see on the iMac having said that one big advantage of banku is that it's it's Mac compatible so it it synchronizes the colors of your uh Mac to the uh the banku screen so they are synced as as much as possible and that's something that happens automatically in the background so um yeah that's one other reason that as a Mac User I find banku monitors very uh useful um all right so uh so uh let's see Ryan is asking for those without experience do you think having Adobe certifications and making as best a portfolio from Passion project are the best things you can do when looking for your first job so when you're looking for your first job definitely your portfolio is going to be a it's a must to have a very like strong portfolio that represents your uh your your skills and your style but uh and and besides that they would ask for experience so have you worked anywhere have you done any project before and uh in these cases having a certification is a good replacement because that is H it's almost like an an official way of proving that you actually have the technical skills you don't you don't just have the pretty visuals but you actually have the technical skills to back up that knowledge that you uh that you offer and uh for people who have been working as graphic designers or illustrators for several years and they have in their CV several let's say creative agencies they work that or or big clients they work for for those type of in that situation I don't think it's really necessary to have a certification anymore because there is no no need to prove that you are technically capable because that's all the certification is for technical uh abilities the the exam itself doesn't require you to be uh very artistic or to be great uh in terms of visuals to be honest and this is something I mentioned in the previous uh stream dream as well that the examples used in these exams the Adobe certified professional exams at the moment um are really bad in terms of uh like if you are looking at it and judging it in terms of how the compositions look in the examples they are the examples that I would normally use what not to do as an illustrator or graphic designer they are just horrible and I don't know why that is the case uh clearly whoever is putting together these uh questions is not good at at graphic design or illustration uh in terms of coming up with good compositions they might be very good at uh using the software but that's completely different from actually being good in the industry so I am not trying to say anything bad about anyone who is working on these exams I'm just being critical about what I've seen because I've taken these exams many times and every time I've seen the examples it was literally an eyesore like I had almost like a headache after I've SE I've seen those examples honestly it's like the best of stuff that you would you would show to students what not to do as a as an illustrator or graphic designer um and um yeah if if anyone is watching this from from uh uh the C Port the company who's running these exams I hope they listen because that's something that every time I take an exam I always uh send my feedback that I'm saying the exam itself is great it really testes the the the skills that proves that you know how to use this tool so I'm not saying technically there is anything wrong with wrong with the exam aesthetically there is everything wrong with the exam so uh yeah I I can't really show any of these examples because you can't take screenshots when you are taking the exam of course so it's it's not allowed to share any of these but yeah just imagine the worst examples you can think of uh in terms of composition color Harmony and just in general um anything to do with graphic design uh Theory okay so um let me see a few more questions yeah so rer is saying portfolio first second and third that's what's going to get you a job and I 100% agree and rer I don't know if you agree with me uh but as someone who I work with many people in the past and I hired people uh to do creative work I don't really care whether that work was created for a brand an actual existing brand or it's a a passion project as long as it's explained well in the portfolio what it was created for uh why that person is creating it um as long as I see the passion that went into it and the professional workflow that uh was used to achieve the final result so as long as I can see uh work in progress like sketches and different concepts and I can see the whole workflow presented to me I don't care whether it was a real project or not to be honest sometimes I'm more interested to see someone uh presenting really full like passion projects in their portfolio because then I can also learn about their interests and it really tells me what type of person they are what what really intrigues them and and and how they think compared to if they just uh uh showcase work that they created for Brands so it's like an additional flavor in a portfolio that makes it even more personal if you're presenting these passion projects and I just wanted to mention at this point that one of the main reasons why I came up with the pro membership um um service that I've been doing for several years now I think it's probably been at least 5 years maybe more um I think around five six years now that we started this program where we Mentor or or give mentoring to um our students we have a couple of hundred Pro member students at the moment and this is something that we do on a continuous basis so we give feedback through our community um but we we have webinars every month like closed webinars for our proom members directly where we review their work and just for just so you can see I'm just going to open this quickly here we use milanote for most of the things that we do um and by the way I just have this open here on my screen I wanted to show this as well to you um we have this design contest running at the moment it's still active there is still time I think around 12 days left to submit work it's the it's a logo design contest uh where you can actually get uh access to our Pro membership for free so if you are the main winner you get three months of pro membership for free uh where you get mentoring directly from me so I would actually review the submitted work that you do whether it's personal projects or projects that we have on our site um and then I would give you personal feedback like this almost like talking one uh one to one um and this contest uh at the moment that we are running is something that you can for this you can find the link in the description below but I I can also just quickly show it here to you so it's the rainbow and PS uh fictional kids clothing brand for which you have to to come up with a an identity a logo and uh my wife shumi came up with these different uh directions or or Aesthetics for which she created these three mood boards and this was shared on our Instagram as an inspiration for those who are planning to join this contest so if you uh want to have a chance to try out our Pro membership for free then I highly recommend to check out this contest the link is in the description below completely free to sign up um you just have to submit the work so make sure you read the brief and then submit the work before the deadline which I believe was the 25th of September yes so that's that's the deadline and we will have another live stream like this one to review all the work that we that will be submitted and even if you don't win but you submitted your work that will still G get you a chance for me to review the work that you create so yeah I mean that's also a taster of what a pro membership feels like and we have Pro members Pro member students who's been with us for actually couple of years now uh and they decided to stay because they still learn and gain new uh skills and insights into the industry and especially now with the changing landscape with the generative AI um like popping up everywhere um we try to help our students also not to uh not to uh improve their skills but also stay a float of uh the the really like the Sea of changes in the creative industry so yeah we we we have an amazing Community um and yeah we are very proud about our Pro membership so it was a little bit of a side note but I wanted to mention this that uh the prom membership is all built one of the main thing about prom membership is that we have now over a 100 uh test projects or per uh projects that you can work on so yeah you have you have all kinds of projects like U I can actually show this in the site let me just jump there quickly and I will just open this up so you can see it and I will answer the questions in a second and also we will jump back into illustrator once I I uh showed this to you and then we will look at a couple of more technical things so yeah this is our this is our learning platform where we have I think right now over 60 courses uh so loads of lots of courses to learn from but more importantly in terms of uh personal projects that you can use in your portfolio this is probably the best place to come come to so we have prepared these briefs specifically in mind to help our students to have a direction that they feel like they work for a real client with real requirements um and then when they're presenting their work they already have that framework in place and they actually get the feedback from us as well so they get they they get to include the refined work that what that they got feedback on in their portfolio so it really is the closest thing possible to having experience in the industry without exposing yourself to clients because that can be a tricky thing there there's lots of things that can go wrong with clients and that doesn't mean that it's uh going to be any any issues with your skills or with your artistic uh Talent um you can just get very bad clients sometimes you can be unlucky and get bad clients um not to not to mention you can also be scammed nowadays as a graphic designer that's actually something that happened with me recently I am very cautious about uh emails and uh DMS that I get when people say that oh they would love to work with me because of this and that um unfortunately many times it turned out to be uh just a scam that they try to either access our YouTube channel or they want to hack in to I don't know our course course platform uh but uh the most most upsetting one was when they made me believe that they want an illustration project from me and they pretended to be a college in the US and it seemed completely legit they sent me so much stuff uh the only thing that I didn't have with them is a is a face tof face call and uh nowadays that's a musle like like I don't do anything anymore uh without actually having a face tof face score but who knows how long it will take to actually be I don't know be able to use generative AI uh to to fake these type of calls and and and scammers will be able to even fool someone just pretending to create a call or something like that but anyway I didn't have a face tof face call with them uh but they actually transferred me a good amount of money uh 50% down payment for the project is agreed uh it's a couple of thousands of pounds it was uh for that illustration project so the money was transferred it was in my bank account or the company's bank account and it still turned out to be a scam uh a fraud where they requested some of the funds back because of some changes in the in the client uh requirements and then it turned out to be that they it turned out that they can retract the money from my bank account or the company's B bank account within 72 hours I think there was some kind of uh regulation about this in the US so it was from the US they transfer the money and then it could be uh retracted by them saying that it was a a false payment or something like that luckily I managed to get my money back the one that I transferred to them so in the end I almost lost some money on this and that's basically the scam so they they send some money making it feel like it's a real project and then they ask you for some of that money back but then in the end they take all the money back and then you end up spending more money on them or giving them more money uh and you don't you end up with nothing uh so luckily luckily I managed to uh sort it out with the bank or actually it was with PayPal I think it took a long time it took weeks and a lot of frustration but I got through it um and actually this is something I was planning to do a a YouTube video about just to warn other graphic designers and creatives because this can happen to anyone obviously I'm a public public uh speaker I speak on YouTube and it's easier to find me um and people um find me and and obviously they know uh that I can be targeted but yeah the most common scams uh are are they are trying to get money from you or they trying to get access to something that you that you own but yeah so that's that's about scamming let's just go back to uh some of the questions that you asked so let's see um so someone is asking how does one really make a portfolio work do you find prompts and stuff to make a portfolio for an advertising or corporate job um so that is basically something I I think I already covered so our Pro membership I think is one of the best solutions for this but if you want to do do it on your own you can even ask Chad GPT to come up with some uh briefs for you um and then and then work on those uh but they won't be as accurate uh and as um realistic to what you would get in a real um agency environment or in a real creative projects and obviously my team we worked in the in the industry for over 20 years all of us so we have a deep understanding of what are the requirements and we worked in all kinds of different areas from licensing designs to retouching and uh motion design um so so we know uh what's what's going on in the industry and that's how we tailor our briefs and that's how we give our feedback as well so just like a real client would or like a real creative director would within an agency um and that's why that's that's a valuable stuff that you you don't really get if you do everything on your own so you can like I said you can use CAD GPT come up with some briefs or I don't know recreate something that you see on on be hands in your own style uh but it's probably not going to be as effective as having um also getting feedback on your work and being able to refine it some of our prom member students when they submit their work they have to resubmit it a couple of times so sometimes it takes them two three months to get a project right because uh yeah we give them the feedback and say like okay this looks good but there's still a lot you can improve on and and then obviously we specify what that can be and then we expect them to update it and then until we are 100% happy and we as professionals can say that yeah this is something that you can proudly present in your portfolio we wouldn't approv the project um and uh we actually have within our platform a buil-in uh like way to track the progress obviously because I'm the I'm the admin you won't see much progress on mine but the students will be able to see how many projects got approved so out of the 102 projects currently we have available on the site uh they will be able to see exactly how many projects they uh successfully completed and then they can also see a breakdown of which tools they were using which creative Fields they uh went into in more depth and um yeah so that's that's uh really a way of tracking their progress uh okay so let's see one a few more [Music] questions what device do I use to create illustrations so I use um my iMac Pro and I use a vacum inos tablet which it's just a small one I think it's the small size uh I have also a big vacom syntic but I stopped using it I don't feel it's necessary anymore um because it really depends on the type of work that I do but most mostly this is what I use and I use my iPad with actually procreate is my favorite sketching tool that's where I do my sketches so for instance for some of these projects that you've seen like this one here I can show the sketch that I created in procreate so that that's like every project starts like this so I first would open up my Pro create do some sketches there and then the one that I like I drop into illustrator on the desktop and then I would start working there now illustrator on the iPad is also a good uh tool and I use it often but it's not something that I would use for every project so it has its limitations sometimes if I'm on the move uh let's say I'm on a train or a plane and I have a really good sketch that I know I want to turn into um a vector artwork I would actually start within the illustrator on the iPad so within the iPad already doing uh the main shapes drawing the main shapes but I would always refine it further on the desktop because I feel like I have more control when I have my mouse as well in hand um because in particular with illustrator you have to have Precision control and although using a stylus is great for more organic and more fluid illustrations but when it comes to more precision I still like to use my mouse as well so I would switch back and forth between the two and uh so you can in a way you can say that I still spend most of the time working on the desktop that's the main um place where where I create my art but the iPad is actually uh becoming more and more a big chunk of that uh not just in the sketching and concepting phase but sometimes also in the actual like structure phase and I can also show another example of this so for instance um you've seen this dinosaur example and again I can show the sketch that I created for it so that's the sketch in procreate and that's the final Vector illustration that I created based on it but what I've actually done for this one and for this one I know I remember I've done this on the iPad I can show you the uh iPad version of this dinosaur uh was this let's just opening up yeah there you go so the main shapes like I said so um that already saves a lot of time so when I sit down on the desktop if I have these in place these are the most important elements and then after this is really just refinement once you have these in place you are happy with how the anchors are set up so I can have a look at the outline and the anchors are looking good then I can um refine this on the desktop so yeah that hopefully that answers your your question that was a little bit long-winded answer but uh hopefully that answers the question um uh uh uh the certification is not free unfortunately I think it's around 15 $50 so pricey pricey exam um by the way we have also included a link in the description below for a uh sign up I'm just going to uh open this up quickly as well so I'm working on courses dedicated to preparing for the zob certified professional exams and if you sign up for this wait list it's completely free to sign up we will be uh giving out a few free exams uh or uh they're called exam vouchers that you can use to then take the exam um to uh some of the people who sign up to this wa waight list so we will be um doing doing a a draw and then we uh just randomly pick a few people who sign up here so if you want to be amongst those lucky ones who can uh win a free exam voucher make sure you sign up to this and besides obviously you will get to hear about uh these courses when they release and you will get some uh special discount on them and you will be the first to uh know about them being released so yeah check this out the link is also in the description below I'm just going to pop it here in the in the comment section or chat sorry so you can check it out okay so uh uh the my course The Illustrated course on UD me uh what about the 2023 and 2024 features um I believe I uploaded some of the 2023 features already but I might be wrong uh good good thanks for reminding me I'm going to make sure that they are up to date uh on our own platform we have all the new features I did but yes because some of our courses are on these other platforms like udmi um sometimes we are we are not uh careful enough to make sure that they are always up to date but thanks for reminding me uh Muhammad I'm I'm going to make a note about this and I'm going to make sure that we will update the course um so also someone is asking about on our platform about the pro member sub subscript ion and the starter it's two different thing the starter membership will give you access to one particular uh course the boot camp which is a very good program as well to take uh especially for someone new to graphic design or someone who wants to get into graphic design that is the um so that's the stter membership that is giving you 12 projects to work on it's broken up into 12 weeks but you can complete it it in your own pace so you can complete it much faster if you want and uh so yes it has these um Projects magazine cover Lea flat uh you have web banners you have uh brochures business card t-shirt all the typical type of things that you would have to do and even illustration it includes some illustration uh posters and then it goes into ux and web design a little bit as well so yeah I mean that is a uh very good program to to try as well and it's definitely cheaper than our Pro membership but uh it's not it doesn't include mentoring so we we give feedback to some of our starter members work on our community but it's not guaranteed while a pro member is guaranteed to get feedback on any work that he or she submits so that's the main main difference there uh okay all right cool all right so jumping back to illustrator and I'm just going to turn the screen a little bit around just one second I just noticed that there was a big Reflection from one of my monitors there's so many monitors around here and the sun was just reflected from it so we are in illustrator now and I wanted to show you a couple of things that uh you can expect to be asked in the exam because within the exam that a couple of questions at the beginning which are more you could say Theory so it's multiple choice questions where you have to say um what's wrong or what's what's right what's true what's not true or maybe connect a couple of things uh recognize the icons in the interface for instance but then there's the second part of the exam where you actually are within Adobe Illustrator and there is a panel uh which has the question and then you have to complete that task within illustrator so you are actually using illustrator and there's a couple of ways to to complete these tasks um and that's a good thing so they allow you to achieve the result in whatever way you want as long as you get the result they are asking you will get a pass so you will get the point in the exam now just to give you a few examples of um or what type of questions you can expect I am just going to jump into illustrator yeah and so for instance one is how can you remove or please remove uh the Stray points from a document so what would be a stray Point first of all stray point is any Anchor Point that just exists on its own so I'm just using the pen tool here and I created these points and when I go into outline mode you can see them one is there another one is there and there's actually another one here or no that's just the center point of that shape um another way of do uh finding these is also using select all or command control a that will again highlight the uh anchor points and um and then once you have these selected um actually you don't even have to have them selected for this to work but what you will need to do is to go into the object menu and then you have to go into I think yeah this is the one so object object path cleanup and within that there's the delete stray points option and you can actually choose to delete other things like unpainted objects empty text Parts these are all usually stuff that just gets in the way and messes up your illustrator file so these are the things that you want to purge out and if I click okay you see how those two points immediately delete uh been deleted so especially for big Illustrator files this is something that um is recommended to do so that can be a question and the good thing is because you are an illustrator within the Adobe I mean within uh illustrator s sometimes you might remember that oh I know this feature i' I've seen it somewhere you can actually browse through all the menus so you are not limited to uh thinking from the top of your head like oh I think it may have been in the object menu or was it in the was it in the edit menu I can't remember now uh you don't have to worry about that you don't have to memorize illustrator because you will be able to use it during the exam and that's actually amazing thing because I I remember in the past with the Adobe certified expert exam where it was literally just a multiple choice question exam you had to memorize everything you had to remember this by from from memory by heart you had to recall where things were and that was really annoying because no matter how often do you you use these features sometimes you just forget where what the menu is called but you know where it is you have like a a muscle memory to go back to it and select it but um yeah that was just frustrating uh luckily with these new exams that's not the case so if you roughly know where the feature is you can literally just browse through and you most likely will find uh what they refer to or what they want you to uh find and the most important thing is that you have to have a working experience in the tour so if you have a feel of where things are uh even if you haven't done that particular task that are asking for you most likely will know generally in what direction you need to look for it and even if it's the first time you do it you might actually get it right thanks to the format of the exam so that's that's a really really good thing and that's why I highly recommend to consider taking these exams for beginners because that's when these certifications can really make a difference in in your career when you're just getting started and want to uh find your first job or become a junior designer or even an intern in a in a company an agency that's when these certifications can really make a difference and and help you to prove uh your worth uh in terms of understanding the tool now let me give you another example uh one thing that they really like to ask uh are things that you can you you need to do like in a precise way so for instance they ask you to place down a guide at a particular spot or to make sure that you place an object in a particular space so for instance if I have to draw a rectangle right I would use the rectangle tool but with the rectangle tool most of the time we just click and drag and then draw the shape however if you click and not drag then you can specify the actual size so you can be much more specific let's just say I needed a 50 mm square and then I can click okay and then if I need to move this to a specific spot I can for that use the transform panel right or the properties panel as well it gives you the same option and here if I need this to go to the top uh left of the screen I can use the top left corner reference point of this so that's highlighted here in the transform panel and I can say this needs to be 100 mm from the top and the left left side of the screen or maybe if I want it to be closer let's just say 20 mm from the screen I mean from the edge of the artboard both from the top and the and the left so I could be very specific about its size about its uh location and uh yeah that's basically it so um this is again something that is very commonly asked in the exam so you have to be knowledgeable about how to be precise when it comes to placing like guides for inance instance again it's another one they love to ask if I go into um the settings here uh guides and then make guides um now actually let's turn this one that can also be a question by the way so if you want to turn an object into a guide that's something you can do in illustrator I believe it's only an illustrator not in Photoshop or in in design U Maybe I'm Wrong there but this I think is unique to illustrator so you can actually have an object and then turn it into a guide with this feature so view guides make guides and command or control 5 is the shortcut for it so now that whole object became a guide um all right so let me give you one more example uh uh uh let me give you one more example that you can EXP back uh in the illustrator exam I'm just uh looking at a few examples I made some notes um yeah so one other typical question would be if you have a few objects let's just say you have these five squares here on the top how would you make sure that they will be distributed evenly with a specific spacing between them so you want to create a a single line or row of these objects with let's just say 20 mm space in between them right so this is something that you will be able to do within the Align panel and the Align panel has the distributes spacing options and if you just click on distribute horizontal distribute space that's going to do it evenly and keep the left and the right object in place but if you then uh if you then say you want to align to a key object you can choose which one is the key object which will stay in place and then you can actually specify the distance between them so you can say 20 mm distance and then you have to click again on on the distribute option so a couple of steps required and and again I'm not saying that this is something that um they will definitely ask but I've seen similar questions to this or at least to this complexity in these exams and if you are not familiar how this works it would be tricky to get this right in the exam scenar uh set up because you only have around I would say 2 minutes for each of these time asks um 3 minutes max um I think there's 30 questions and you have 50 minutes so yeah I would say less than two minutes to be honest and that's just not enough for every question to to be wasting time playing around with thing until you can figure it out so you can you can leave it up to you can leave it up to uh um I mean you can risk it and and and then try experimenting with things while you are doing the exam but I would recommend to get familiar with most of these tools at least the basic stuff so things that you can do with uh layers um the appearance panel uh the transform panel is like I said something they love to ask about swatches panel prop properties panel this you should be very familiar with and obviously the tools uh most of the tools uh in illustrator you should be familiar with and that icons which one is which um um and then you're pretty much already halfway there I would say uh to be able to pass the exam but yes so this particular example of having to distribute the spacing between objects while having let's say the one on the left stay in place required me to first of all find the Align panel then having those objects selected making sure I choose the aligned to key object first specify which one is the key object then type in the spacing 20 mm and then click on the horizontal distribute spacing so that's a couple of steps required to be able to answer that um or complete that task for this exam uh so yeah that's roughly uh the the complexity that you can expect in the illustrator exam and uh would you like me to show you a few more examples like this or uh would you prefer if I showed you or talk a bit about the generative features in illustrator U because we have a little bit more time um I'm also happy to answer any more questions that you might have I think I answered most of the questions that came up so far so feel free to let me know um do you prefer to see more of these examples or while I'm waiting for the answers I'm just going to show you an example here this is actually something that I worked on and is going to be coming out uh soon most likely next Monday we will release a video about this workflow it's a packaging design tutorial showing how to use Adobe Illustrator together with P Dora which is an honestly um an amazing online tool for packaging design visualizing packaging designs and creating di lines and customizing di lines and the reason I'm showing this example right now is to show you that this package or packaging that I created uh fully features generated Vector illustration so I tried to push the current uh generate generate vectors feature as far as I could and I'm actually surprised how good it is when you are not that strict about style or or the quality so obviously this was for a tutorial I was free to uh just explore things that I wanted to but I had a clear um Concept in mind so I knew I wanted a d a dinosaur something that looks a bit like a velociraptor or a T-Rex it doesn't have to be a specific dinosaur but I wanted a predator that has um has its mouth the jaw open and big teeth um around that Central uh display that is within the uh packaging and this is for a popcorn uh I'm just going to show you the final uh let me just show you quickly the final ER visual for this uh I have that one here somewhere yeah there you go so that's the final visual I used U Photoshop U and actually I used that OB be Firefly uh to create the background um and then I used the pacora to create that realistic render of the product I use generative fill in Photoshop to add the popcorn inside the box and the popcorn around it um so yes uh this is how this would look like this D line once it's closed and most importantly you can see that this is fully Vector everything is Vector here so it's fully resolution independent which is very important for any illustrator project you want to work with as much Vector as possible I mean and avoid using roster images but the most uh the coolest thing is that it created this dinosaur and I can show this without the clipping mask on it so if I just turn off the CLI in and I turn off the uh let me just turn off the D line around it as well so that's the illustration that uh illustrator created for me and there's also this other uh dinosaur head here on the left and there's also these little uh flying dinosaurs here um and I mean it's not perfect because there are some strange artifacts around the teeth here but that could be could be actually the way this dinosaur teeth are um there's some things that would definitely need tidying up especially around the eyes but in general I feel like it's done an amazing job at uh at creating these elements that I could use for this packaging and the way this feature works if you're not familiar with it it's an illustrator you just choose from the contextual tasar which you can find in the window menu so you just go up there uh make sure that that's highlighted and then within there you can choose generate vectors and then you type in what you are looking for so if I just say dinosaur uh with a big open mouth uh maybe apex predator dinosaur I think that's that's the prompt that I used before and it was a subject I think I increased them detail to maximum but we can just try it keep that in the middle and I don't think I used any TI reference or anything else I just hit generate uh when I created this one it takes some time sometimes to get it right because best way I can I can uh the best way I can uh uh compare generative AI to is is really like um um like gambling it's like you you you don't have any assurance that you will get get something right you just have to keep trying it's like those machines you keep pulling the arm and then eventually you get something good but I mean like look at that that looks impressive and that wasn't even with the with the full or like the higher highest uh quality um and that that has a lot of detail in it I look at the outline it's it's actually impressive um so yeah like this one would work even better here on the left side now that I see it that's that's that's even nicer and I love the colors on it as well it's a really nice color palette and by the way whenever you use this tool I think it already takes into consideration whatever you have on your artboard so it's um I feel almost certain that it picked up on the colors that I used in this design uh but yeah so that's what it created but it has a couple of versions and I can switch over to see those as well and this looks great as well by the way um let's see the second one really nice I still like the first one the most and just out of interest if we do this again generate vectors with the same prompt I'm just going to pump up the uh detail level to maximum and let's just generate again um let's see how this is going to turn out yes Reaper I agree that the style of the illustration the back and the front doesn't really match and also what I I I don't like about this second one is that it doesn't I mean it's on the bleed on the edge of the pack and um it's obviously would just show the the the mouth or like the nose here uh and uh but but then it wouldn't continue on the other side while I made sure that this main illustration continues on the on the lid uh on the top when someone opens that out but uh yeah um yeah matching the illustration style is that was also another slightly tricky thing that uh with generative AI can be problematic but yeah I'm not really sure what the detail level difference means in this case because we can see that was the medium this is the high detail level they're pretty much the same um if if you ask me um but generally it improved a lot compared to how this feature was first shipped I know that they have a new shape uh or vector model I think it's Vector model uh version two at the moment um I think the full name is Adobe Firefly Vector model version 2 uh but maybe it's already version three I'm I'm not 100% sure uh but just like just like the image model this is also just going to get better and better um they're training it more adding more or feeding it with more information uh refining it and the more we use it as well the better it will get um it is a bit concerning because it's going to make us lazy so those who are already using illustrator and has the skills to be able to do something like this um might get lazy and will start to do more and more things just simply relying on generate features or generative features uh but more concerningly those who are just starting out will definitely take the fast route um if they can do it like this then why would they have to draw a sketch and then trace it over painstakingly um so yeah it's a bit concerning because um yeah these these look impressive to be honest and it's Vector illustration so it's resolution independent as well um so yeah that's that's uh it's it's not going to go away uh it's definitely something that we just have to adaptt to and um and learn to utilize um but um but yeah yeah so gener generative AI is uh is rapidly improving and it's just getting better and better today I was just experimenting with sunno uh this song Creator Ai and it's just crazy uh especially combined with CAD GPT uh the the the speed and ease with which you can create really realistic songs in specific genres is just unbelievable it can even imitate dialects in certain demographic areas like I am based in London and I wanted it to sound like uh uh someone the singer to sound like um from London and it nailed it perfectly um I made some funny songs I'm just going to pop the link in the description I mean in the chat uh let me just jump back here I will pop this in here about an illustrator blues uh I think it's really funny uh let me just copy this and you should be able to listen to this after the stream I recommend um that's that one and the same one I have in a different style as well uh which one was it yeah I think I think that's the that's the best one there's a few other ones but uh but yeah that that was probably the best one um but yeah it's just just crazy um if you are interested this this song has lyrics about why someone can find illustrator uh annoying or frustrating to use um so it's like the struggle struggles of an Adobe Illustrator user I think I called it illustrator Blues um most of it was written by chat GPT but I added a bit of the lyrics or refine the lyrics make it a bit more aligned with what actually a graphic designer would be uh annoyed about um and uh I probably will include this uh Link in the description as well for those who will be watching this uh um once it's recorded not the live version uh but yeah so let me just see if there's any other questions before we wrap up because I think we are short on time now I really had fun by the way um talking to you all uh today I I hope you enjoy these live streams I'm planning to do at least two more this month uh plus the one about the contest which once again don't forget to sign up to uh and make sure not to miss our logo design contest it's a fun little project doesn't require much work probably a couple of hours you should be able to put something together um H we actually haven't made a a point about not to use generative AI for this so we allow generative AI but I will be able to tell if someone is using it I I'm pretty sure I will be able to judge how much of your work is uh relying on generative AR or not but I'm just curious to see that's why we didn't actually ban the use of it um I know in most I actually judged I was in the panel of couple of uh contests one was for Bank Q uh last year where it was clearly stated that you can't use any uh generative AI um which is a good thing I think most most design contest should run like that but in this particular case we are not even mentioning it so we are not promoting AI but we are also not saying no to AI so we are curious to see what you can do whether with or without it but yeah so let me just uh read quickly any additional comments before we wrap up um uh uh all right so AI upscaler 100% agree rer um I use magnific AI I always promote that um on our website um and to our students as well and um I I feel like they are still the best but maybe you know of something better um but I yeah I'm just uh I'm not going to open it right now but magnific AI is the one that I feel like is the most professional uh for upscaling um although it's obviously sometimes hallucinates and changes things so if you have to be very specific about someone's face like a person well-known PE person's face it can mess that up and change it um but uh it depends on what you're using it for but I feel like magnific AI is is an amazing one for that um and then let's see yeah yes I agree it's a very good point repper again that uh without the eye uh without having the eye to be able to choose from the generated stuff that you get um you still won't create good work so for exceptional work what really will set you apart is if you are the one if if you if you're someone who can cut through uh and really filter out and choose the right things for the right purpose and graphic design and illustration are both visual communication and it's just like talking so anyone can talk right uh anyone can talk but who would you listen to someone who is just just struggling to explain themselves going round and round in circles without saying anything useful or would you listen to someone who really is clear concise and gets the message right the first time uh without without struggling and and being very very being able to explain everything very nicely so that's that's exactly the same thing with visual communication you have to have an eye to be able to pick and combine the things that we work really well together and that delivers the message of that particular brief or project that you're working on so yeah it's just like communication that's why it's called visual communication um and yeah so AI is not communicating it's delivering something that you are asking it to do um you have to turn that into H um you turn that into something that will fit the fit the Brie for it's it's just it's just like a raw material that you will be able to polish and get right but you can't fully rely on it um and I don't think it's going to change in the future I think we already peing at what AI can do there might be even more automations and maybe even slight refinements but it's just like with computer Graphics in games uh I think we are already at a point where it's so good like all all the games just look so amazing that we don't see that much big changes and advancements anymore it's just really minor improvements here and there but uh yeah it's it's like it's peing at a point that it can't really go any further and I think generative AI um in terms of its quality both in images and and uh videos and music I think it reached that that maturity level very fast uh but I don't think it's going to be able to keep on increasing its quality um in the future so it's going to stay somewhere around the same place where we are now but having said that there might be AIS which will be able to combine multiple things so you will be able to prompt to make a whole um like a I was just talking to my friend today about this that instead of a song you can just say I want a movie about specific topic and then it will not only make the movie uh based on some images that you put in put in the prompt but also is going to generate the soundtrack for it and I mean the score and uh so on and so forth so it would be much more complex in that sense than what it generates and the the things that it utilizes but we will see that's again something interesting for the future uh and rer I agree I wouldn't use AI on a branding job maybe as in the concept stage to come up with lots of so crazy ideas it's almost like having a brainstorm session with your friends asking them to just do some sketches on a specific um brand name um for that I think again AI can be used because you could just say okay just create lots of things with this but again AI with text whether it's mid Journey or Firefly Firefly especially I don't think is that good with text but even me journey is struggling with it um maybe probably the best one is Mystic in uh in free pick at the moment I've seen uh when it comes to generating text but yeah so