Adobe® Illustrator®: A Visual Guide for the Mac: A Step-by-Step Approach to Learning Illustration Software

Janet AshfordJanet is the co-author (with John Odam) of Start With a Scan.

Janet Ashford is a freelance writer and designer and the co-author of threebooks on computer graphics: Adobe Illustrator: A Visual Guide for the Mac (Graphic-Sha/Addison-Wesley, 1995), Aldus PageMaker: A Visual Guide for theMac (Graphic-Sha/Addison-Wesley, 1994), and The Verbum Book of PostScriptIllustration (M & T Books, 1990).

For the past five years Ashford has written a regular how-to column oncomputer graphics for MacUser magazine, has been a contributing editor andwriter for Step-By-Step Electronic Design, and has written regularly forPrint and Step-By-Step Graphics. She has created designs for books,newsletters and brochures and produced original illustrations for posters,textbooks, and magazines.

Ashford has worked as a fine artist for the past twenty-five years, creatingdrawings, paintings and posters with watercolor, pen-and-ink, oils,acrylics, and silk screen. She is also a musician, and she composed andperformed the original music for the interactive Photo CD that accompaniesThe Official Photo CD Handbook (Peachpit Press, 1995).

Before becoming involved with computer graphics, Ashford wrote many booksand articles on childbirth and women's health, including The Whole BirthCatalog (Crossing Press, 1983). She has a B.A. in psychology from UCLA.Ashford and her three children live in Encinitas, California, north of SanDiego.

Janet Ashford is a writer and artist focusing on computer illustration and design. She is a regular contributor to MacUser, Print, Step-By-Step Graphics magazines, and is a contributing editor of Step-By-Step Electronic Design newsletter. She is a coauthor of the Verbum Book of PostScript Illustration and a contributor to the Verbum Book of Digital Painting, The Desktop Color Book, and The Photo CD Book. Her background in traditional art media combined with her extensive experience as a computer illustrator and designer give her a unique understanding of the computer graphics field.

Linnea Dayton is the co-author of The Photoshop 3 Wow! Book, Mac Edition and The Photoshop 3 Wow! Book, Windows Edition.

Linnea Dayton is a contributing editor to Step-By-Step Electronic Design, a full-color monthly newsletter for graphic designers and illustrators, whichshe edited for the first five years of its existence. Formerly managing editor of Verbum magazine, she is co-author of the Verbum book series (PostScript Illustration, Electronic Page Design, Digital Painting, Scanned Imagery, and Digital Typography) as well as The Desktop Color Book, The Photo CD Book, The Photoshop Wow! Book (Mac and Windows editions for Photoshop 2.5), Aldus PageMaker: A Visual Guide for the Mac, and Adobe Illustrator: A Visual Guide for the Mac.

Hometown: Southern California

Email address: 75300.2510@compuserve.com

Latest Peachpit book: The Photoshop 3 Wow! Book (available August '95)

Words of wisdom: Don't give up.

How you get into this business?:I earned a Master of Science degree in comparative endocrinology at University of Washington. I worked as a research associate at Scripps Institution of Oceanography for awhile, but abandoned the academic environment for editing (which could be done at home until the kids reached that safe middle age range of 7 to 12 years), at which point I went to work as a technical writer. I took a class on how to use a Commodore 64 from Vahe Guzel, founder of Educorp; he needed an editor for a book he was writing about using the Commodore, so we traded editing for classes and software. When the 128K Macintosh came out in 1984, he bought one and wrote a book, Becoming a Mac Artist, which I edited. He bought a bigger and better Mac (a 512) and I bought his 128K machine. I got pretty excited about MacPaint and MacDraw and took the Mac to work to show my colleagues how neat it was. Then I went to Australia for a year (we're now up to 1985-86) and when I came back Michael Gosney had started Verbum magazine and asked if I'd be interested in working on it. The Verbum group produced several books and started Step-By-Step Electronic Design for Dynamic Graphics, all of which I could work on from an office at home (which was where I wanted to be since the kids had now hit the dangerous 13-to-18-year-old range). And the rest is history.

Favorite Web site: Anywhere except where the spider hangs out.

What do you love about computers?: Almost everything.

What do you hate about computers?: The way all the folders on my desktop get renamed when my cat walks on the keyboard.

If you were stranded on a desert island, what would you take? I would take... a sunbath.

Oddest thing on your refrigerator: There's only one odd thing - the latch/padlock arrangement installed to keep the pig out.

All my heroes are:Idealists.

Most inspiring books:Deschooling Society by Ivan Ilich; Indian Summer by John Knowles; The Autobiography of Mark Twain; Six of One by Rita Mae Brown; anything by A. S. Byatt, Margaret Drabble, Tom Robbins, Martin Cruz Smith or Armistead Maupin; The Holy Bible (Authorized King James Version)

Is the info-highway revolutionary or all hype? Potentially revolutionary. Because the computer-literate elite is a somewhat different group than the traditional (very wealthy) elite, the info-highway threatens the economic status quo, which makes a lot of people beyond the very wealthy elite very uncomfortable. I already sense a desperate desire to commercialize it, if only to keep the status quo from shifting before the traditional elite can catch up. But since neither group is likely to make a concerted effort to solve the problems of poverty, racism, and inner city turmoil, it may not matter too much how it turns out.

A bit about my family:One husband, one grown son, one grown daughter, one pig (currently in absentia), two dogs, one cat, three turtles, two lizards, one parrot. All great company (except maybe the pig).

Linnea Dayton is the former Editor-in-Chief and now a Contributing Editor of Step-By-Step Electronic Design, a full-color monthly newsletter for graphic designers and illustrators using the computer, and electronic design editor of Step-By-Step Graphics magazine. She is coauthor of the Verbum Book series (Postscript Illustration, Electronic Page Design, Digital Painting, Scanned Imagery, and Digital Typography) as well as The Desktop Color Book, The Photoshop Wow! Book, and the Photo CD Book. Her role as writer and editor provides her with an overview of the field of electronic art, design and production as well as insight into specific techniques employed by the artists working in it.