What a brilliant post. On the surface, I never would have thought that a site dedicated to making one’s blog would find relevance in showing users how to design an ebook cover.

Makes complete sense, of course, and really opens up the possible posts my users would appreciate. I’m a fan.

Thanks.

-Joshua

And I totally agree about Illustrator being the favourite. I think people sometimes overlook it in favour of Photoshop. I use it as my “base” program, importing .psd files into it not the other way round. I find vectors so much nicer to work with

Adobe Illustrator is a very powerful program, my personal favorite out of the entire Creative Suite, with Photoshop as a close second. While I’m pretty decent with Illustrator, it is true there are numerous ways, some better than others, to achieving similar effects. I’ve personally not messed around with the Attributes panel too much, as suggested by Esz (thanks for the tips! – I’m using CS3 at the moment, though – are the Attribute features similar in both versions?).

For those using/learning Photoshop, I would highly recommend getting Illustrator as well – the two programs work so well together, I sometimes wonder when Adobe is just going to combine the two into one super-powerful, all-encompassing photo and graphics editing tool.. although I’m not sure if it’s possible to combine a pixel-based program with a vector-based one.. we’ll see.

In regards to any resources for learning Illustrator, one of my favorites is VectorTuts ( http://vector.tutsplus.com/ ), which is part of a collection of graphic design tutorial sites, covering Illustrator, Photoshop, web design, Flash, After Effects, etc. There are also many design blogs out there that post tutorials on a regular basis: GoMedia, Smashing Mag, Abduzeedo, BittBox, DesignM.ag (not a typo), etc etc. If you’re into Twitter, which I assume you are if you’ve read Marko’s great eBook on Twitter Marketing, you can follow most of these blogs and get up-to-the-minute updates of new tutorials and resources posted by these sites.

Once again, thanks for the reviews of this article! Please feel free to contact me direct if you have any more questions, or want to collaborate on any design/marketing projects!

Cheers,
Daniel

I consider myself an intermediate Photoshop user but Illustrator is pretty new to me.

Cheers!

Alex.

Actually, there is no reason to be multiplying and/or outlining live text to give it any sort of stroke effect in Illustrator. You can order the stroke so it sits under the fill and add a second stroke below that to create the second, darker outline.

The same could be done for the speech bubble – adding separate fills that are offset slightly and with each their own effect.

There are many many things that can be done with the Attributes panel and it is probably the most powerful part of Illustrator. If you aren't using it, you're not using Illustrator to its full potential.