If you ever want to design the art for your GUI in Adobe Illustrator vs. Adobe Photoshop, that is perfectly fine. It adds a bit more time to convert the artwork to Photoshop, but it’s a simple matter of copying/pasting objects from Illustrator to Photoshop, and pasting them as “Smart Objects” to retain the vector quality. Then, it’s just prepping the Photoshop layers for PhotoProto export to Altia Design.
This process creates png images out of the original vector art, so they are no longer vector images.
To actually use the Illustrator art as vector graphics, you export as SVG directly from Adobe Illustrator, but this option should ONLY be considered if you are targeting hardware that has OpenVG graphics acceleration, since Altia DeepScreen targets do not support the SVG vector Path object without having the OpenVG engine available on the hardware. To be clear, most targets do not support OpenVG.
Thus, the standard path from Illustrator to Altia is:
1) Copy objects(s) from Illustrator
2) Paste as Smart Objects in Photoshop
3) Prep layer(s) for PhotoProto by naming them correctly and using keywords (see PhotoProto Training Video)
4) Run PhotoProto
5) Import PhotoProto output to Altia Design.
NOTE: Photoshop/PhotoProto is not a REQUIRED part of our tool chain, but it saves you tons of time up front since you can easily layout all your objects, create some simple buttons and decks, and establish a naming convention using the layer names in Photoshop (the name are using in the resulting animation names and generated png file names).
Should you decide to use a different tool other than Photoshop, and/or should you not have PhotoProto, then you just need to use any graphics tool capable of creating png files for the images, and then import them manually into Altia Design using the Image object.