Often we think of ecommerce only in terms of tangible goods, like clothes, shoes, or toys, but a huge portion of ecommerce revenue comes from the sale of software or other virtual products. These downloadable items provide unique design opportunities.
In today's tutorial, I will show you how to create an exciting product pricing page in Adobe Illustrator CS4. This is the sort of price comparison page that you find on any number of software or software-as-a-service sites.
In the tutorial, I will be covering some new tools in Illustrator as well as using some more familiar ones. The first thing I will show you is how to create a table using the Rectangular Grid Tool. I will show you how to manipulate the grid using the arrow keys on your keyboard to add or remove cells.
Next, I will show you how to use the Live Paint Tool to create fills for each of the cells in the grid. After creating the basic grid for the pricing page, I will show you how to create two icons for indicating whether or not a feature will be included in the product being purchased. I will also show you how to create a high-quality bar graph icon to indicate which of the products on the pricing page offers the most features.
Once you have created the icons, I will show you how to layout the text and feature information for the rest of the grid cells to create an informative pricing page.
Finally, I will show you how to create "Buy Now" or "Purchase" buttons to place at the bottom of the product columns. By the end of this tutorial you should be able to design your own product pricing page using Adobe Illustrator CS4. In addition to the pricing page featured in this tutorial, I will also include an alternative pricing page design in the source files to give you another example of how a pricing page could be laid out.
