Do designers ever do any kind of web work in Illustrator?
Yes, I only use Illustrator!
Switched over a few years ago from Photoshop and never looked back.
Why the switch? In one word, Agile. The process begs for something a bit more quick, open, and lightweight - whilst at the sometime offering great scalability to take graphics across different mediums (electronic & print). A definite must if your working towards an RIA output, there are now many plugins that output to XAML and even HTML5 - I'm currently outputting for Flex (or SWC'ing)
With the added capabilities of pixel locking and pixel preview. It makes it the perfect tool for application design. Combined with all my brand and iconography work which would be vector based anyway - everything becomes seamless.
Illustrator also offers the ability to design multiple GUIs over several artboards that can be outputted to PDF (I've ditched the .ai file format altogether!) This is great for quick presentations, emailing, sharing, collaborating, etc.
In fact, its changed my whole teams workflow where architects and designers all build within illustrator and develop wireframes and increment fidelity to final design in the one application. No need for Balsamiq > Omnigraffle > Photoshop round trip - just way too many file formats!
Its now got to the point where I wonder why most 'designers' (especially web) still use Photoshop? Quite simply, its an image retouching tool for bitmap/raster graphics. Not a design tool.
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