Adobe Illustrator CS4

I’ve always believed that Adobe Illustrator suffers from an identity crisis. Unlike Photoshop or InDesign, which are easy to describe with a single descriptive phrase (“photo editing,” “page layout”), Illustrator has always been referred to more generically as a "vector graphics application." Yet Illustrator CS4, now in its fourteenth version, has evolved into an essential design tool for just about every type of creative professional.

Thirteen versions and twenty-one years after the very first Illustrator, Adobe is rolling out beta versions of Illustrator CS4. After so many iterations, you might wonder what Adobe could possibly do to make Illustrator CS4 worth the cost of the upgrade. In this preview, I am going to highlight the most noticeable changes with big scoops of screenshots and video to give you a real taste of the new Illustrator. Note: this preview is done on the Windows version of Illustrator CS4 Beta.

At version number fourteen, finding more features to improve the already near-perfect Illustrator app is probably quite the challenge for the developers at Adobe. Yet, they’ve managed to do it again and we’ll go into these features in just a moment.

At one time, Illustrator competed head to head with FreeHand. But after Adobe acquired Macromedia, it announced it would no longer develop FreeHand. And the other mainstream competitors to Illustrator, Corel’s CorelDRAW Graphics Suite X4 and ACD System’s Canvas 11, don't run on Macs, and neither app has secured a significant foothold in the professional design community.

That makes me especially happy to tell you that the Illustrator CS4 upgrade offers a little bit of everything: entirely new features and significant enhancements that will appeal both to longtime users and to people migrating from FreeHand. And, probably the most impressive of all to me, a collection of “little things” give Illustrator an overall polished feel.

Sound the trumpets! Release the balloons! The most requested Illustrator feature of all time -- multiple artboards -- has finally arrived. A single document can now contain up to 100 artboards, and each artboard can be of its own size and orientation (they can even overlap each other). Each Illustrator document contains a single large overall “canvas” where you can easily manage all of your artboards, using Illustrator’s new Artboard tool.

When the Artboard tool is selected, Illustrator switches to Artboard Edit Mode, allowing you to move, copy, add, or delete artboards. A toggle lets you specify whether the artwork on an artboard moves along with the artboard, or whether artboards move independently. The improved Smart Guides feature (covered later in this review) also works on artboards, making it easy to arrange them.

Because you need to be in Artboard Edit Mode in order to manage artboards, I find that artboards never get in the way of my work -- they are there when I need it, and don’t bother me when I don’t.

Most importantly, artboards act just like pages do -- you can print and export just the pages you need, and creating a multi-page PDF document to show ideas or concepts to a client works as you’d expect. You can even place multi-page native Illustrator documents into Photoshop, InDesign, and Flash. The multiple artboard feature is intuitive and easy to use, and it allows you to easily manage artwork across entire campaigns, all within a single document.

Expressive Drawing, without the Excessive Expletives:
When talking to professional artists, animators, and illustrators, I’ve found that many prefer drawing in Photoshop or Painter because those programs allow the pros to more easily express their creativity. Illustrator’s anchor points and control handles can get in the way. Live Paint (added in CS2) does help, but you still have to draw the art before you can begin coloring it. And while Illustrator does have a pressure-sensitive calligraphic brush, the brush strokes don’t work with the Live Paint feature.

So I was immediately drawn (couldn’t resist the pun) to Illustrator’s new Blob Brush tool, as it brings the best of both worlds. Because it works like the pressure-sensitive calligraphic brush, you get an intuitive tool that allows for expressive drawing. At the same time, each paint stroke is automatically expanded as you draw it, making your art instantly compatible with Live Paint, as well as the Eraser tool added in Illustrator CS3.

Perhaps the most innovative feature in CS4, the Blob brush is intelligent. As you draw with the tool, your brush strokes automatically merge with the underlying art, creating a single overall object to work with instead of multiple objects. Since the Blob brush pays attention to color, it will only merge with like-colored objects. For example, when you paint with red, the Blob brush merges only with other red paths. This “painting in context” functionality means you don’t have to continuously lock and unlock objects as you paint. Objects seem to know how to behave as you paint, based on their color attributes.

I absolutely hate the name of the tool (it’s too close to “blah”), but I love using it. You can use the bracket keys to adjust the size of the brush (just as in Photoshop), and if you’re drawing with a Wacom pen, you can flip the pen to over to erase without even thinking about it. It’s the closest thing to real drawing I’ve seen in Illustrator, and it's easy enough (and fun enough) that my five-year old daughter can do it.

Transparency in Gradients… and More:
Ever since gradients were added back in version 5, Illustrator users have longed for the ability to specify transparency to colors in a gradient. In CS4, you can assign an opacity level to any color stop in a gradient, similar to the way Flash designers can specify an Alpha value for colors in a gradient. (The new transparent gradients in Illustrator are compatible with Flash.) But Adobe didn’t stop there. There's also a new gradient widget that lets you edit gradients directly on the artboard. It’s a lot easier to adjust a gradient in context than in an unfriendly gray panel.

Clipping Masks that Really Clip:
While it’s obvious that designers migrating from FreeHand will appreciate the multiple artboards feature, I suspect they'll come to appreciate the new clipping mask behavior in Illustrator CS4 even more.

The biggest complaint about Illustrator masks has been that when artwork is clipped, you can still select that artwork -- even if it isn’t visible. In Illustrator CS4, masked artwork is now truly hidden -- from view and from your selection tool. The improved isolation mode feature (covered later in this review) means that a simple double-click of the mouse lets you easily edit the contents of a mask.

Improved Appearance and Style:
Ever since it was introduced in Illustrator 9, the Appearance panel has become one of the most important panels in the application. In Illustrator CS4, the Appearance panel not only displays information about the attributes applied to an object, it also allows you to modify attributes and add effects. The panel also includes visibility icons (little eyeballs) for each attribute, making it easy to quickly experiment with a variety of applied effects.

Graphic styles are also improved, as you can now apply them to objects cumulatively. In other words, you can either apply a graphic style to a selection and have the style replace the appearance already applied to the object, or you can have the style add the settings on top of the existing appearance of the object.

Sweating the Details:
Illustrator CS4's updated user interface is now consistent across the entire Creative Suite, including Fireworks and Dreamweaver. This was a lot of work for Adobe, which is why they like to talk about it so much. But compared to the new features in Illustrator CS4, a new interface is less exciting.

That being said, the updated interface is functional and unobtrusive. For example, Smart Guides is more refined (and on by default). Smart Guides appear as you work, helping you quickly align or modify files in context. Perhaps the most important aspect of Smart Guides is that they now let you snap objects to guides and to each other. While this is taken for granted in InDesign and Photoshop, the Snap to Point feature in previous sversion of Illustrator only snapped to the cursor. Now, you can easily snap objects precisely to each other without zooming all the way in to make sure they're aligned correctly.

Speaking of aligning objects, the Align panel now easily identifies key objects so that you can align objects to an object that you specify.

Adobe has also greatly enhanced the isolation mode feature in CS4 so you can isolate individual paths. (Previous versions allowed for group isolation only.) Instead of having to constantly lock and unlock objects that get in the way when you're working in complex documents, a simple double-click lets you edit an isolated object with ease.

A Little Something for Everyone:
While the many enhancements in Illustrator appeal to all types of designers, certain improvements alone will be worth the price of admission to users in certain fields:

Cartographers will especially appreciate an overhauled Type on Path engine, which does a much better job when setting type that following along a vector path.

Prepress operators will find value in the new Separations Preview panel. While it doesn’t feature the powerful Ink Manager found in InDesign or Acrobat Pro, it performs ably as advertised, previewing process and spot colors on screen.

Environmental and industrial designers will welcome Illustrator’s ability to simulate artwork on screen as a person with colorblindness might see it, enabling designers to ensure the right amount of contrast in their designs. Approximately 7 percent of Americans are color blind (that’s 10.5 million people), some governments (especially so in Japan) have been particularly vigilant in taking steps to ensure that public signage is clearly visible to all.

The Verdict:
Is Illustrator CS4 now the perfect application? Has the software reached its true potential? Far from it. Because Illustrator appeals to such a large audience, additional functionality is always on my wish list. Where is a sophisticated pattern generator for fashion designers? What about powerful controls for better anti-aliasing that web and interface designers crave? How about the ability to create interactive PDF documents and flowcharts? Why not an updated graphing feature or a core set of smart drawing tools? There are still plenty of features that can be added.

But that doesn’t take anything away from the fact that Illustrator CS4 is the perfect upgrade. I’ve been using Illustrator in a professional capacity for more than 15 years now, and I think this is the most appealing upgrade to Illustrator ever. Why? Because it’s relevant. Some versions contain features that might be cool -- and even incredibly useful -- but that are used only once in a while (e.g., 3D, Live Trace, Live Color).

In a truly refreshing contrast, just about every enhancement in Illustrator CS4 is core functionality -- all of which I’m already relying on each day.

Features to Write Home About:
Aside from the previous mentions of the new multipage Artboards and the Blob brush tool, here are some fun tidbits of the new version.

This tool, which doesn’t have an official name, allows you to view your image on screen, as someone who is colorblind would see it. Why is this important, you might ask? Well, other than the entertainment value, it allows you as a designer to see the contrast (or lack of) in your image and whether the almost 8% of colorblind people will see it clearly enough.

Awesome Features:
Probably the best improvement to the new Illustrator is the ability to work with multiple pages and the new Artboard tool. Basically, cropped areas become new Artboards and each Artboard is treated as a separate page. There are still some things Adobe needs to figure about this approach, but it’s definitely a good, much anticipated feature.

Updated Gradient Panel:
Adobe finally addressed one of my biggest complaints about Illustrator: the inability to form a gradient from color to transparency. Now, Gradients have opacity options – Finally! This option lets you select any of the colors on the gradient slider and choose its opacity. For even more control, you can now double click on the color slider and access the full range of color picking tools.

Artboard Tool:
While this could technically fall under “changed” features, it is cool enough to warrant its recognition as a whole new feature. The artboard tool is an evolution of the crop area tool from Illustrator CS3. However, instead of using cumbersome hotkeys to create multiple crop areas, CS4 re-thinks the whole concept of an artboard. In CS4, using the artboard tool will create a new artboard by default and give it a number automatically. Clicking on the white space of any artboard with the Selection Tool will activate it. These new artboards are way better than the nearly invisible crop areas of CS3, and make it much easier to manage projects-in-progress! Adobe makes it clear that these new artboards mean business – Artboards can have their own rulers! Just right click on the active artboard and tick “show artboard rulers”. Artboards are always editable – you can resize and move them around until you’re satisfied.

Most importantly, this tool is very well integrated into the Export window. Finally, you can export multiple artboards (crop areas) to separate files in one step!

Last, we’ve got artboards within artboards. if you think this is getting ridiculous – so do I. While I can hardly imagine the need for nested artboards (on top of the document-taming tab tools in CS4), Adobe must have found a need for this feature. To enable it, simply hold shift while dragging with the artboard tool inside of an existing artboard. Check out the video for a short demonstration of the new artboards in CS4.

Blob Brush Tool:
The first new tool I noticed was the Blob Brush Tool. If you’ve ever worked in flash or frequently expand brushes, you’ll probably appreciate this new tool. Here’s how it works: it organically draws a shape instead of a path. As you draw with the brush, the path is expanded every time you raise your wacom pen (or mouse). Then, as you add more brush strokes, overlapping sections are automatically added together to form one shape.

One problem with older versions of illustrator has been its implementation of brush-based painting. For some time now, Illustrator users have been able to “paint” with brushes that resemble rough ink scrawls, watercolors, and other stylized strokes. However, these paint effects have always been applied one path at a time, with a new path laid down for every stroke of the brush. This approach sometimes results in noisy, chaotic-looking painted areas, instead of smoothly filled forms. The alternative has been to use pen-based drawing tools to arduously manipulate vector outlines, or to draw out a path that defines the boundaries of an object.

Illustrator’s new Blob Brush Tool looks like other brush tools, and responds appropriately to a pressure-sensitive tablet (if you have one) and stroke direction. But rather than stroking each path of your brush with a textured painterly shape, as you lay on strokes, the tool automatically melds any overlapping paths into a single outlined form, no matter how scribbled or chaotic your painting. This lets you paint in an area alternating between large, billowy strokes and small detailed fillets, and end up with a single, solidly filled object that can be re-filled, outlined, and treated with styles, like any vector object. As long as the strokes you’re painting over have the same fill and stroke style as the current brush, Illustrator welds the overlapping surfaces together. This means you can even use the Blob Brush to modify the shape of primitive objects like circles, rectangles, and type outlines.

When the blob brush tool is double clicked, brush options are available. I was happy to see that Wacom tablets will be fully supported with blob brushes. Depending on how the final product turns out, Wacom artists may be able to ditch the Photoshop + Autotracing routine and stay in Illustrator the whole time by using blob brushes.

The Illustrator’s toolbox has been slightly shuffled in Illustrator CS4. The eraser tool is given a more prominent place in a group of often used tools – it now sits along with the pen, text, shape, and brush tools. This means that the scissors and knife tool have also moved (they’re only accessible in the flyout of the eraser). The slice tools use to sleep in the fly out menu from the crop tool. Now, they have their own spot on the toolbar.

Finally, while having little effect on your workflow, Adobe moved their logo and link from the tool box to the menu bar. These are the kind of little tweaks I really enjoy – they make CS4 feel more polished, refined and purposeful.

The paradox of new software is that it must balance conflicting interests: more power and improved usability. That is probably why the most recent versions of Illustrator keep re-thinking panel (they’re only palettes in Photoshop) management. Well, CS4 is no exception. The brains at Adobe have made workspace presets more accessible by putting a drop-down menu right above the panels. They’ve also done a lot of the leg work to convince us that custom workspaces can save time. These presets are easily accessible and fill the dock with customized panels for typography, web, painting, etc. The presets from Adobe also include application specific layouts such as “Like Photoshop”.

CS4 has more document management tricks up its sleeve – frames. These frames are accessed via a little icon to the right of the menu bar called “Arrange Documents”. Click and you’ll find a drop down list of frame presets for two, three, four and more open documents. These presets are useful for comparing two documents side by side (especially on that new 30″ cinema display, right?). The “Arrange Documents” menu contains many presets for arranging open documents – stack side by side, on top of each other, in a grid, etc.

The next interface change may have you wondering if there is something wrong with your view settings. No, everything is working fine. Illustrator is overriding the Microsoft Windows Title Bar – the minimize, maximize and close buttons are integrated right into the main window (similar to Google Chrome). This not so subtle tweak actually saves quite a few pixels, which, it turns out, you’re going to need!

One of the best changes to the user interface in Illustrator CS4 is document tabs. If you have more than one Illustrator document open at a time, they automatically form tabs ala Firefox. If you want, these tabs can be separated from the main Illustrator window by grabbing the tab and dragging outward. You’re probably already an expert at managing tabs, and after a few minutes in Illustrator CS4 you’ll wonder how you put up with all that minimizing and restoring of documents. Tabbed documents save a lot of clicks.

If you look closely at the screenshot below, you’ll also notice that there is no ‘Filter’ menu – only an ‘Effects’ menu. I speculate that Adobe did away with the redundancy of the filter menu because of increases in effect performance and changes to the appearance panel.

Another great improvement is the new Blob brush tool. It can best be described as an “intelligent” brush, one that is pressure sensitive and merges with other (same colored) objects to create one seamless path. You can even use the Eraser tool with it.

Functionality and User Friendliness:
For those who have already used Adobe’s products, the user interface is very similar so you won’t have a lot to learn. I find the interface intuitive, even without much training in the software and like the “tabbed” appearance.

This version seems streamlined. For example, the new Appearance panel merges several panels you would have had to use separately in the past and gives a one-click access to editing your selected object. There have also been some definite improvements with the gradient tool from previous versions.

The basics about Illustrator: it’s compatible with both Mac and Windows, has a bevy of add-ons, plug-ins, and tutorials to choose from that will enhance your user experience. If you’re new to drawing, you’ll find help in the form of books, forums, how-to articles, and even videos. For the more seasoned users, if there’s something you want to do, there’s probably a (third-party) plug in for that. It’s a heavy app so make sure your hardware meets the requirements listed on Adobe’s page.

The catch is that Adobe Illustrator CS4 is unlike raster-based digital arts programs; Illustrator is vector based and therefore not designed to simulate the behavior of traditional media. If recreating an artist’s studio is what you’re into, then go straight for Corel Painter 11. To understand the differences, first know that vector based programs (like Illustrator) represent images and graphics in terms of mathematical formulas. Raster based programs represent images by their pixels, the individual points of color that collectively make up your image. The only thing you need to take away from these differences is that vector images, thanks to their mathematical properties, can be resized again and again without degrading. Raster images when scaled will lose clarity but raster graphics are much better for color-rich things like photographs.

With that said, Adobe Illustrator CS4 is a powerful graphics program and integrates seamlessly with the rest of the Adobe production suite (Photoshop, a raster based program, InDesign, and Dreamweaver).

Degrees of Separation:
While Adobe has been a bit slow to add new toys to the Illustrator toolbox, it has compensated by maintaining an efficient, reliable production environment suited to the tasks at hand. This release is no exception. The capability to quickly preview color separations in the new Separations Preview panel is particularly helpful for identifying unwanted spot colors and avoiding costly printing mistakes.

Another powerful performance enhancer is the new ability to manipulate appearance elements within the Appearance panel. For example, you can click on an effect, such as 3D Extrude & Bevel, within the Appearance panel to modify its settings. Complex appearances can take a long time to render, and they may need to be updated with every change to your artwork. In this version of Illustrator, you can hide appearance elements to dramatically improve Illustrator’s performance.

Adobe has also updated the graphic styles functionality in Illustrator, so it’s now much easier to save and apply sets of attributes, such as fill color, stroke style, layering, and graphic effects. These graphic styles make fast work of repeatedly applying effects to multiple objects.

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