Most people who use Illustrator every day learned it in fragments, on deadline, from whoever happened to be sitting next to them. Level 2 fills those gaps in a deliberate order and replaces slow habits with production methods: fewer anchor points, fewer duplicated objects, fewer files that fall apart when a client changes one colour.
Day one is about making artwork that would be tedious to draw by hand. You build custom art, scatter and pattern brushes, use blends to construct a decorative border, work with freeform gradients and gradient mesh, and make a repeating pattern with no visible seam, then apply it to a packaging panel. Appearance attributes and graphic styles run through the whole day, because they are what turns a revision into a two-second edit rather than an afternoon of redrawing.
Day two is production. You draw an isometric product illustration using precision transforms and the 3D and Materials effect, build a dieline on its own layer and place artwork against the cut and fold lines, use symbols and Global Edit to change a repeated element across several artboards at once, and set up a two-colour spot job with overprint checked in Separations Preview. There is a session on rescuing an inherited file, which is the job most designers actually inherit: unused swatches, thirty layers called Layer 1, and a path carrying four hundred anchor points where twelve would do.
Bring a live file you are stuck with. The last session of the second afternoon is a clinic, and real work from the room is usually the part people remember. If identity work is your goal in particular, the one-day Logo and Brand Systems in Illustrator workshop follows on directly from this course.
