From the course: Creating Illustrator Infographics

Chart anatomy - Illustrator Tutorial

From the course: Creating Illustrator Infographics

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Chart anatomy

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- [Narrator] As this chapter is about working with charts and graphs inside of Illustrator, it's probably a good idea to cover off some terminology so that we know what we're talking about, as we move through the chapter. Now to start off with the area that Illustrator considers a chart when you draw one is essentially just the chart area itself, that does not include the value access as you can see on the left hand side here and optionally that can also be on both sides of a chart or the category access which here at the moment is empty for this particular chart, but that's where our categories would go. The columns themselves in this column chart are referred to as a cluster. So you'll see that terminology as we are in that movie particularly and on the right hand side here, we have the chart legend, which is optionally on the right hand side here or above the chart, you have that option as you'll see, as we move on. Now if I move across to a line chart on the next art board in this file, it gives me an opportunity with less clutter to point out the tick marks that you can see here on the value and category access, those have options inside of Illustrator charts. And then we also have the data points here or as they're referred to in Illustrator: markers and they are joined together by either lines, that's completely optional by the way, or filled shapes. Now the difference or the exception to these rules is a scatter plot. This is a very, very different thing completely. And because it's used to compare values, it doesn't have a category access at all. It just has two value axis. And we'll get into that later on in this chapter. And finally here where you of course have a pie chart which most of us I am sure are familiar with. And this one doesn't have any axes at all as it's an area based chart and it's there to represent proportions of a whole. There you go. There are a few other things that we'll look at as we move through but the most essential things which axis I'm talking about, for example, and whether I'm talking about markers or columns, those things are important. So just review those if you've not come across them before but otherwise let's go and bring some data into Illustrator in the next movie.

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