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Defines the future of vector graphics.

Create distinctive vector artwork for any project. Used by design professionals worldwide, Adobe Illustrator CS5 software provides precision and power with sophisticated drawing tools, expressive natural brushes, a host of time savers, and integration with Adobe CS Live online services.

Adobe Illustrator occupies a slightly odd position in its market. On the Mac, it’s the de facto choice for vector illustration, used for everything from logos to fine art. PC users have other options, though, including CorelDRAW and Xara Xtreme.

To stay ahead at the high end, Illustrator added a number of unique features in CS3 and a new interface in CS4. In CS5 the changes are practical rather than structural: Adobe has made certain tasks easier and provided more tweaks to make things look precisely as you want.

The innovation that may see the most everyday use is variable width strokes. Drawing lines that vary along their length is one of the abilities that makes modern vector programs more than just technical drawing tools. Previously, there were various ways to do this, including drawing with the stylus of a pressure sensitive graphics tablet and applying various predefined contours, but getting the effect just right could take considerable trial and error. In CS5, you can add width handles at any point along a path to adjust its exact breadth at that point, and most brushes and effects applied to it will scale to match.

On the same theme of putting you in control of your drawing, complex strokes such as dashes, arrowheads and brushes have extra settings. For example, art brushes allow you to stretch and repeat elements along a path. The results can look awkward at sharp corners, but you can now make simple tweaks to fix this.

Since vector graphics are scalable without loss of quality, they’re a good choice for elements such as buttons and banners that will be repurposed for various jobs and screen sizes. But scaling isn’t always simple; for example, you might need to stretch a button to twice the width while leaving its text label intact. A system known as nine-slice scaling facilitates this in Illustrator CS5, letting you set up elements that scale exactly as you want.

Bristle Brushes create more realistic ‘painted’ strokes nothing like the wet media in Corel Painter, for example, but interesting for a vector-based environment and the Draw Inside option lets you ‘colour in’ shapes rather than applying a mask afterwards.

Traditional perspective drawing is sometimes neglected now that 3D software allows objects to be designed in 3D space, but that’s often an unsatisfactory approach for graphic artists.

Illustrator’s new perspective grids make drawing in 1, 2 or 3 point perspective almost foolproof, allowing items to be positioned and scaled within perspective planes. By adjusting the grid to match a placed photo, you can place new graphics into an existing scene, for example adding logos to buildings or packages. This is in some ways similar to the Vanishing Point feature in Photoshop, but potentially more powerful.

Although cheaper rivals may offer more instant effects, it’s increasingly hard to fault Illustrator’s breadth and depth of features, and integration with the other Creative Suite apps is a significant bonus for many. For example, Flash Catalyst, new in CS5, makes it simple to turn user interface elements designed in Illustrator into an interactive Flash app without programming skills.

Despite a fairly steep learning curve, Illustrator remains the most professional of drawing programs, offering stability, depth and print production credibility that others can’t match. For its target audience, this is an upgrade well worth paying worth.

Adobe Illustrator offers you all thne needed tools for creating and managing amazing vector art design!

Here are some key features of "Adobe Illustrator CS5"

Sophisticated vector drawing controls:
· Create distinctive designs with precise shape building tools, fluid and painterly brushes, and advanced path controls.

Gradients and transparency:
· Interact with gradients directly on your objects and control the transparency of individual colors in gradients and gradient meshes.

Beautiful Strokes:
· Fully control variable width strokes, arrowheads, dashes, and art brush scaling along a path.

In-panel appearance editing:
· Edit object characteristics directly in the Appearance panel, eliminating the need to open fill, stroke, or effects panels.

Integration with Adobe CS Review:
· Create and share online reviews for clients down the hall or around the world with Adobe CS Review, one of the new Adobe CS Live online services.

Industry standard graphic file format support:
· Work with almost any type of graphic file including PDF, EPS, FXG, Photoshop (PSD), TIFF, GIF, JPEG, SWF, SVG, DWG, DXF, and more.

Adobe PDF file creation tools:
· Create more secure, multipage, graphic rich PDF files with Illustrator layers retained. Share files confidently with service providers, including support for PDF/X standards.

Advanced typography:
· Design beautiful text for virtually any media with professional controls for paragraph and character styles, support for OpenType, transparent effects, and more.

Perspective Drawing:
· Use perspective grids to draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1-, 2-, or 3 point linear perspective and create the look of realistic depth and distance.

Multiple artboard enhancements:
· Work on up to 100 artboards of varying sizes in one file named, organized, and viewed the way you want.

Drawing enhancements:
· Draw behind, disregarding stacking order. Draw or place an image inside, instantly creating a clipping mask.

Integration with other Adobe design applications:
· Share files smoothly with other Adobe professional design applications and easily create artwork for multiple uses.

Crisp graphics for web and mobile devices:
· Create vector objects precisely on the file's pixel grid for delivering pixel aligned raster artwork.

Ask and Ye Shall Receive:
Ask an experienced user for something they’d like to see addressed in a new version of Illustrator and you’ll rarely hear a request for something big. In fact, you’ll find that most users wish for seemingly small things -- like adding an extra menu command here or there to help with the everyday tasks -- ones that are constantly repeated over and over again. In CS5, Adobe finally addresses numerous "small" requests -- with a few innovative twists along the way.

Create a new document in Illustrator CS5 and you’ll notice the ruler’s origin point is positioned at the top left of the document. And when you're using multiple artboards, each artboard now maintains its own ruler and origin point. Speaking of artboards, you can now assign names to them. A new Artboards panel lets you easily navigate between artboards and rearrange their order. A new Auto-Rotate option in the Print dialog box changes the paper settings to portrait and landscape automatically so that you can print all the artboards in your document at once, even if the artboards have mixed orientations.

Illustrator CS5 even breathes new life into the most basic of functions, like selecting, pasting, and path editing. You can now press and hold the Command (Mac) or Control (Windows) key while making selections to choose objects that appear beneath other objects in the stacking order. And CS5 sports two new paste commands: Paste in Place, which lets you copy an object from one artboard and paste into the exact location on another artboard; and Paste In All Artboards, which does the same -- but across all artboards at once. And after 14 versions of being forced to join anchor points two at a time, you can now use the Join command to fuse multiple paths and anchor points with one action.

Illustrator CS5 introduces the concept of drawing modes. In Draw Normal mode, each object that you draw is added above objects in the stacking order. Press Shift-D to toggle to Draw Behind mode and each object you draw will appear beneath other objects in the stacking order. Select any shape and press Shift-D again to enter Draw Inside mode, where anything you do happens inside of the selected object.Basically, Illustrator automatically creates the necessary masks for you. For example, when Draw Inside mode is active, you can use the regular Paste command to paste objects directly into other objects, without having to manually define a mask. This is similar to the Paste Inside feature that Freehand users have longed for.

With each release of Illustrator, the Symbols feature becomes more important and more powerful. Besides being able to work more efficiently, Symbols are also directly compatible with both Flash Professional and Flash Catalyst (Illustrator symbols become Flex optimized graphics when brought into Flash Catalyst). With CS5, symbols now have their own layer structure, like mini documents, and they support individual registration points and 9-slice scaling directly on the Illustrator artboard.

Several raster based effects, including the oft-used Gaussian Blur, now maintain their appearance even when you change the resolution value in the Effect > Document Raster Effects Settings dialog box. This means you can design at lower resolutions for better performance, then crank up the resolution before you go to print, without negative consequences. It also makes it easier to share content between print and Web documents.

In Illustrator CS4, Adobe added the ability to assign opacity values to individual color stops within a gradient. In CS5, Illustrator can now do the same for individual mesh points in a gradient mesh object.

While all of these items are just small enhancements, they have a huge impact on the bulk of the work you do in Illustrator every day. I covered them here first in my review because in my opinion, they are the most important.

Strokes Get a Complete Overhaul:
Looking at past releases of Illustrator, you can point to watershed features like gradients, the Appearance panel, and Pathfinder: things that have dramatically redefined the kinds of art you can create and changed the ways in which you get your work done. With Illustrator CS5, you can add yet another feature to this list: variable width strokes.

Illustrator users often take strokes, the attributes that control the appearance of paths, for granted. While there are settings like dashes, joins, and caps that can change the appearance of a stroke, the most common adjustment we make to strokes is the weight, or the thickness of a stroke. Strokes have always been limited to a single consistent weight that's distributed along the entire length of a path, but many of us have dreamed of creating strokes with tapered edges or non-uniform weights. In the past, we struggled with tedious workarounds, such as outlining strokes and adjusting anchor points manually, or applying brush strokes with pressure-sensitive pens and tablets.

In Illustrator CS5, you can use the new Width tool to adjust a stroke’s weight along any part of a path, with absolute precision. Normally, Illustrator paints the stroke along the centerline of the path, but using the Width tool, you can easily add or remove thickness from both sides of the path individually. As you click and drag with the Width tool, Illustrator defines width points that define the overall appearance of the stroke. You can double-click on these width points to enter precise measurements, and you can also drag width points along a path to make adjustments. And then there’s the best part: all of the width points applied to a path make up something called a width profile, which you can save and easily apply to other paths.

As an added benefit, you can also use the Width tool to add width profiles to Art and Pattern brushes. You can now also define "stretchable" areas in Art brushes, so that they scale intelligently.

In addition to the Width tool and width profiles, Adobe also enhanced the way that dashes are applied to strokes (corners now line up evenly). And instead of having to add and modify effects, you can now specify arrowheads as a stroke attribute directly from the Stroke panel (much like InDesign). You can instantly flip an arrowhead from one side of a path to another, and you can even define your own custom arrowheads.

Adobe likes to refer to all of these stroke settings and enhancements as "Beautiful Strokes" and it’s hard to disagree.

Bob Ross Lives on in Illustrator CS5:
Illustrator has had a Paintbrush tool since version 8, but it resembles a real paintbrush tool about as much as the Pen tool resembles a real pen. In past versions, Illustrator supported four kinds of brushes: calligraphic, art, scatter, and pattern. CS5 adds a fifth type called Bristle Brush, which simulates the bristles of an artist's brush.

The underlying engine for Bristle Brush is the same as the new Bristle Tips feature in Photoshop CS5, but with Illustrator, you paint with vectors instead of pixels. Still, it's possible to achieve painterly effects with Bristle Brush even if you've never painted before, though you may want to watch a few Bob Ross DVDs. You can define shaped brushes that mimic traditional brushes (fan, round, angle, etc.), and you have absolute control over a brush’s characteristics including bristle length, density, thickness, and stiffness. With so many variables, there’s no limit to what you can create with Bristle Brush. I’ve enjoyed creating artwork ranging from Japanese calligraphy to watercolor paintings.

The only downside is that to achieve painterly effects with vector paths, Bristle Brush uses transparency settings on multiple overlapping paths. This can sometimes create incredibly complex files that could cause problems during the printing process. If a file contains a significant amount of Bristle Brush strokes, Adobe suggests rasterizing the artwork before printing.

To get the most out of Illustrator’s new Bristle Brush, you’ll want to use a pressure-sensitive tablet. Bristle Brush also offers additional support for Wacom’s 6D Art Pen, which is available for both Intuos3 and Intuos4 tablets.

Draw Artwork in Perspective:
Artists who need to create artwork in perspective often spend time manually drawing complex grids with horizon lines and vanishing points to ensure correct angles and positioning. Then they spend even more time carefully drawing artwork to line up correctly with the grids. Once such artwork is created, it’s difficult to adjust or edit the artwork without adjusting the entire perspective, as well.

In Illustrator CS5, Adobe adds a complete Perspective Grid feature that lets you quickly define a 1-, 2-, or 3 point perspective grid with adjustable horizon lines, perspective planes, and vanishing points. Once you’ve defined a perspective grid, Illustrator’s basic drawing tools draw shapes that are constrained to the perspective grid. A new Perspective Selection tool allows you to move and scale objects while keeping the proper perspective, and you can also use the tool to take existing flat art and snap it into proper perspective. An innovative on-screen widget also appears when you’re editing artwork in perspective to help you choose which perspective plane you want artwork to snap to. You can even move artwork from one perspective plane to another, making it snap from one perspective angle to another.

Defining a perspective grid in Illustrator is easy enough, but as you start to draw and incorporate artwork, using the perspective features become increasingly difficult. A single document can contain a mixture of artwork -- some attached to a perspective plane and some not -- but there is no way to tell which is which, making it confusing to know when to use the Selection tool or the Perspective Selection tool. Some techniques, such as moving art between perspective planes, are only possible using keyboard shortcuts while simultaneously using the mouse.

For complex illustrations that need to be drawn in perspective, the Perspective Grid feature might be useful, but if you have to quickly add perspective to a few elements in your illustration, you’ll probably find it faster and easier to use features that Illustrator has had for quite some time, such as Envelope Distort, or the 3D or Distort effects.

Build Artwork Faster than Ever:
Most experienced Illustrator users know that it can be a lot easier to create artwork by using Pathfinder functions to combine, subtract, or divide multiple objects. If you think about building artwork instead of drawing artwork, you can generate complex designs more efficiently.

However, even experienced Illustrator users often become frustrated with the Pathfinder panel. It takes up extra space on the screen, and it can be difficult to remember which button applies which effect. In CS2, Adobe added the Live Paint feature to help designers build artwork more efficiently, but Live Paint required the use of special groups, which confused many users.

In Illustrator CS5, Adobe adds a new Shape Builder tool that lets you apply the most-used Pathfinder commands (Add/Unite and Subtract/Minus Front) visually. Simply select several shapes and drag across them with the tool to unite them into a single shape, or perform the same action while holding the Option (Mac) or Alt (Windows) key to subtract or remove artwork. There are even options to make the Shape Builder tool behave similarly to the Live Paintbucket tool, allowing you to apply color to objects as you perform Add and Subtract functions.

I’ll admit that when I first saw this tool, I didn’t think I’d find much use in it, as I’ve already come to rely heavily on Live Paint and even basic Pathfinder functions. However, I’m using the Shape Builder tool again and again. It’s really so much faster and more intuitive. I’ve dubbed the Shape Builder tool as the sleeper feature in Illustrator CS5.

Pixel Perfect Web Design:
Illustrator has a bad rap when it comes to Web design. All too often, GIF, JPEG, and PNG images created in Illustrator seem soft or blurry compared to similar artwork created in Photoshop or Fireworks. This difference is due primarily to how Illustrator aligns strokes to paths by default, and how antialiasing affects strokes that don’t align perfectly to the pixel grid.

In Illustrator CS5, a new Align To Pixel Grid function forces strokes and artwork in general to snap perfectly to the pixel grid, ensuring a crisp and sharp appearance for all Web graphics. You can apply this setting (found in the Transform panel) to an entire document so that all artwork you create always looks perfect, and the Web profile you can use to create new documents already has this setting enabled by default.

Figure 8: With the Align to Pixel Grid setting in the Transform panel, a click of your mouse turns soft and blurred artwork (left) into designs that appear sharp and clear on digital displays (right).

Ensuring that text is readable on a Web page is equally important, and Illustrator now contains antialiasing settings in the Character panel (similar to Photoshop) so that your text appears at its best.

If you use slices to generate Web graphics from Illustrator, you’ll be happy to know that there’s a new command that lets you export selected slices directly from your document, without having to open the Save for Web dialog box.

Illustrator is also the perfect companion to Adobe’s new Flash authoring tool, Flash Catalyst CS5. Not only can you bring native Illustrator content directly into Flash Catalyst, you can also use Illustrator to edit components from within Flash Catalyst.

CS Live Services:
Over the past few years, Adobe has been experimenting with online services that include Kuler, Acrobat.com and Photoshop.com. With CS5, Adobe is officially releasing a package dubbed CS Live Online Services that includes the following:

* Acrobat.com, offering a variety of sharing and document services
* Adobe BrowserLab, which allows you to preview how your websites look on a variety of Web browsers
* Adobe CS Review, which gives you the ability to easily conduct reviews with your coworkers or clients
* Adobe Story, a script-writing tool for video professionals

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