Discover the realities and career pathways in the advertising and visual communications industries

Learning Graphic Design & Illustration helps students explore the different career paths available to them while learning key graphic design and illustration concepts, skills, and applications. Students will come away with a deeper understanding of the industry with a focus on fundamental elements and principles of visual art and design. Each chapter is presented through lessons that introduce a number of application features. Students will learn and practice these features as they complete real-world projects such as preparing advertising and marketing materials, designing clothing, or readying files for various types of output.

Integrated coverage of employability, advertising and design principles and history, and career exploration

• Graphic design training, education, and certification
• Copyright laws, workplace ethics, and cyber safety
• Graphic design's heritage and impact on society
• Type design and history
• Employability and communication skills
• Entrepreneurial opportunities in graphic design
• Putting graphic design skills to work in public relations
• Compositional elements and principles in graphic design

Hands-on coverage of the professional applications for today's workplace and Industry Certifications (Adobe Certified Associate)

Adobe Photoshop CC

Students will learn the basics of Photoshop CC, and move on to selection, layering, improving and extracting image content, typographic and vector elements, photo refinement, and outputting a file.

Illustrator CC

Students will learn the basics of Illustrator CC, and move on to Working with Shapes and Paths, Transforming, Positioning, and Drawing, Color and Type, Layers and Fills, Brushes and Styles, and finally Symbols, CC Libraries, and Web Content.

• List of topics to be covered in the lessons and why those topics are important.
• Try It! exercises allow students to practice what they learn about each feature.
• Numbered steps make it easy for students to complete each part of the project.
• Frequent illustrations show students how to select settings, as well as show them results they can use to check their progress.
• Icons included in the steps help students identify the correct tool to use for the current task.
• Exercises include numerous notes that provide helpful tips or alternate methods of performing tasks and definitions of important terms.
• Feature boxes include more in-depth information on graphic design topics, tools, shortcuts, and professional methodology.
• Comprehension Checks at the end of each lesson ask students to pause and check their mastery of lesson content and skills before moving on.

Review, practice, and apply with chapter-ending activities

• Review questions remind students of the important skills and features they have learned and to assess their knowledge of the chapter's key points.
• Multiple Choice questions provide students another chance to test their understanding of chapter content.
• A Portfolio Builder provides step-by-step instructions on how to complete a project that requires students to apply the skills and features they learned in the chapter.
• A Critical Thinking project challenges students to complete a project on their own or with minimal instruction.

Streamline course set-up, class prep, and instruction with a Digital eText  

• One-click navigation to TEKS aligned content. Use the Digital eText, Student and Teacher Editions, to quickly jump from the Texas Essential Knowledge and Skills standards (TEKS) directly to the content in the eText that fulfills that standard.
• 24/7 access to Digital eTexts of the Teacher and Student editions, as well as accompanying Test Bank and PowerPoint files.
• Compatible with Thin Common Cartridge to facilitate single sign-on integration and rostering.