I've always treated Adobe Illustrator with a little bit of disdain because being a Photoshop aficionado I've always felt I could do everything I wanted in Photoshop so why bother. The latest release of Illustrator as part of the Adobe Creative Suite has made me change my mind. I can see exactly what the attraction of Illustrator would be for the graphic designer now that Adobe have expanded some of the features and added in some new and exciting ones to boot.

The Illustrator interface has remained the same, which will be a relief to existing Photoshop and Illustrator users. The interface still features all those "dockable" and "floating" palettes we've come to love (and hate at times). The good news for me was the WYSIWYG Font menu ... so at last I can see a font before I select it, which is great for my short term memory problems.

Object manipulation has become even easier and there are now 3D effects with instant rendering of bevelling, extruding and even rotation. The 3D effects go way beyond simple "Type" effects as illustrated in the images just below. Custom 3D shapes can be created, lighting can be 'arranged' and wrap artwork attached around shapes for packaging mock-ups, just like in the much larger programs like Lightwave 3D and 3D Studio Max.

 

I feel the 3D features alone will attract new users to Illustrator and if you combine it with the new "Type" features of which there are many then perhaps its time you took a look at Illustrator. New "Type" features include optical kerning, optical margin alignment, custom tab-leaders (great for restaurant menus), new path type options (more flexible type on a path) and enhanced hyphennation and justification controls. There is also an improvement to the text linking feature which now allows any text area, including path text, to be linked to any other text area so that its possible to flow text from one text area into a path then onto the next text area. All the better to print with my dear

 

There are many templates available which will save you time in the graphic design arena. Templates vary from restaurant menus to business compliment slips and offer some excellent starting points for those suffering from writer's block.

 

Adobe Illustrator is even more closely aligned with Adobe Acrobat so that if you want to run up a Company brochure in illustrator you can "print" it to Acrobat in a couple of seconds and fine-tune it in Acrobat before sending it out to clients. It was actually this feature which had me sold on the product as it greatly reduced PDF creation and put simply, Illustrator just does some things faster and easier than Photoshop. And, I can't believe I just said that, but its true.

Last week I asked the question whether Photoshop CS was worth the upgrade price and answered yes ... Is Illustrator CS worth the upgrade price? In my opinion ... a huge YES ... a definite thumbs up to Adobe for this feature packed version.