Product Reviews

Illustrator CS4 builds on the rich and varied toolset that Adobe introduced in CS3, delivering a range of new and enhanced features for all sorts of tasks. After working with Illustrator CS4 for a while, what's particularly interesting about it isn't so much the new features, although there are some that are instant favourites. It's actually how easy it is to settle into using this new version. Rather than being something that has to be relearned, it feels like a familiar tool with things more or less where they should be. This is achieved partly through careful design and testing, but it's also down to the fact that this update isn't as revolutionary as some of its predecessors.

The Pencil and Brush tools are joined by the new Blob Brush tool. This does pretty much what it sounds like: it paints blob shapes on your page, using the same range of settings and options as the existing tools. Unlike the Pencil and regular Brush tools which make stroked paths, the Blob Brush tool creates outlined shapes, and blob strokes painting across existing outline shapes will merge with them automatically.

The Appearance panel is a little more directly useful than before, as it offers quick access links to relevant features for whatever's currently selected. Click the Opacity hyperlink in the Appearance panel, for example, and the Opacity panel (the renamed and enhanced Transparency panel)is opened as a pop-up panel right beside your cursor. This makes the Appearance panel even more helpful than before, as it can be almost a one-stop-shop for different features, depending on what kind of work you're doing at the time.

Smart Guides may be new in InDesign, but they're not for Illustrator. Still, the options in Illustrator's Preferences have been enhanced a little, making it an even more useful feature in the right situations.

The Kuler panel, a new Extension that's available across the range of graphics and layout tools in the Creative Suite, provides an innovative way to browse online colour palettes and to access the same colours across different applications in the suite. Creating 'Kuler colours' isn't something you can do within the panel, but you can log in online to kuler.adobe.com, a curiously colour-based form of social networking, and create colour sets there.

One of Illustrator's age-old quirks was how a document was resolutely a single-page entity. This limitation was alleviated to an extent with the Crop Area tool, but that was still a clunky process that really wasn't particularly intuitive for many users. Now that tool has been enhanced and renamed as the Artboard tool. It's in the same place and has essentially the same icon, but rather than making sets of crop marks on the blank pasteboard off to one side of the single document page, it creates new 'page objects' instead. These can be any size

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you like; the same sizing controls for crop areas in Illustrator CS3 are presented for artboard areas in CS4. But the results are page-like rectangles placed on the large (very large) surrounding pasteboard area. The Control bar that sits by the top of the screen doesn't have the width and height fields of the previous version, but rather than being a feature reduction, this has been moved into the new Artboard dialog. Here, you can set the precise scale of an Artboard region, or page as we should think of them now, as well as extras such as whether to show a centre crosshair mark, the traditional crop marks (called Cross Hairs here), and also display inset video-safe and title-safe areas, useful when creating graphics for use in video productions. The only thing you can't do is save your own custom sizes and options as a preset, but that's really not much of a hardship.

The multiple Artboard feature lead us to a few other useful tricks, although one is really more of a Flash CS4 feature. First, when exporting an Illustrator document that has multiple Artboards, you can choose whether or not to use the Artboards. If you don't, you get a single exported file that contains everything in your document ??" but with this on you get individual files, one per Artboard page, and you can set which ones are exported. Saving a PDF does this automatically, generating pages at whatever size and orientation is required. An Artboard can be placed within the region of another Artboard, so one piece of artwork can serve as two different output crops. Finally, when importing an Illustrator file into Flash, you can pick which Artboard you want to use from within the Illustrator Import dialog. The Artboard tool may not seem the sexiest of new features, but it has the potential to help people work far more efficiently.

It's not all perfect in this release. There are still things in Illustrator that should have been addressed many versions ago. Zooming in or out with keyboard shortcuts, for example, doesn't pay attention to what's selected, even though this has been standard behaviour in InDesign for years. The Creative Suite interface is becoming more sophisticated and unified, but the issue of common keyboard shortcuts is an issue that still plagues us.

Gripes aside, there are many things about the new Illustrator that make life easier. Workspace sets isn't a new idea, but is one that's usually overlooked. The benefit of resetting Illustrator's interface to suit different kinds of work shouldn't be underestimated, so to help make this more obvious, the feature is presented as a large text-labelled button in the Control bar. Picking an item from this list (the same as picking it from Window > Workspace) reconfigures Illustrator's panels and window setup to fit specific projects and media.

Illustrator CS4 may not be quite a revolutionary upgrade, but it's a delight to use, and is clearly an improvement on the already sophisticated Illustrator CS3. What's not so clear is where Adobe will take this application next. From its roots as a relatively simple PostScript drawing tool for print designers, it has become almost universally useful across the creative industry. The need to provide features for such a wide range of users may be slowing down the absolute rate of development, but judging from this late beta version, the new Illustrator CS4 will be a must-have graphics tool for any and every serious designer.