1.3.2.9 Illustration software

An illustration program is fundamentally different from a photo editing program. A photo editing program works on rasterized (pixel-based) images. On the other hand, an illustration program works on stroke-based art work. You can, in fact, see an illustration program as an electronic canvas. Art work produced by an illustration program are ``scaleable'', which means it can be enlarged to any size and still retain a smooth and detailed rendering.

There are many popular illustration programs. Adobe's Illustrator, for example, is widely used. Its popularity is followed by Freehand (also published by Aldus, but developed by Altsys, then merged with Macromedia). On the open source side, OpenOffice draw provides seamless integration with other OpenOffice components. For more serious art work, however, Sodipodi and its competing sibling, Inkscape, are more powerful and use SVG (scalable vector graphics) as their output format.

For those who are not very talented in art, there are many commercial web sites that sell art work. On the other hand, you can also use open sourced clip art from sources such as http://www.openclipart.org.