Learning Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a powerful resource for building publication-quality figures and cartoons. You can quickly align your raw SVG figure results and add legends and modifications with more precision than PowerPoint. In addition, you can construct elaborate cartoon models with easier control over manipulating shapes and visual effects.
Remember to export your final figures in a vectorized format (PDF or SVG).
Tutorials to learn the basics
Adobe Illustrator for Scientists (Kevin Bonham)
The following Youtube video series titled "Adobe Illustrator for Scientists" from Kevin Bonham are extremely short (3-15min) tutorials for showing how to do the basics in Adobe. You should be able to organize your heatmaps and composites and build basic cartoons after watching these.
- #1 Simple Shapes
- #2 Complex shapes with pen
- #3 Complex shapes with pathfinder
- #4 Color
- #5 Making data figures: Aligning
- #6 Advanced tools for making figures
- #7 Model Figure from Start to Finish
The videos above are great for the impatient
Adobe Illustrator for Scientists (Adobe)
The select Youtube videos below are from the Adobe Illustrator for Scientists account are useful guides for other figure making needs. Some are a bit redundant with the videos above but they contain some new information that may still be useful if you have time to watch them.
- Common Adobe Illustrator Mistakes
- Aligning objects
- Easy Table
- Lines and anchors
- Math equations
- Eppendorf tube
DrawBioMed
The following Youtube video series from DrawBioMed are more molecular biology-specific tutorials for how to make your own cartoons of things that commonly come up in our lab.