"By delivering this extension and supporting open standards, Adobe helps developers, publishers and designers to make their own choices about how to create, distribute and access content," a representative for Adobe tells WebProNews.

I learned it back in 1988 and it’s sure gotten a lot more powerful since then. Recently I had a chance to sit down with a few Adobe teams (Photoshop and Premiere are coming soon) to catch up on what Adobe’s been doing lately. Here Phil Guindi product manager on the Illustrator team demonstrates to me and talks me through a bunch of the newest stuff. It’s long, but if you’re a graphic designer you’ll probably see a few new things.

Even if you’re not you’ll learn a lot about how this app is used to create much of the imagery you see all around you (most billboards, for instance, are created in Illustrator and so are many Flash and Silverlight animations — the design folks at Microsoft still used Adobe Illustrator a lot when I worked there because it’s such a powerful tool — of course Microsoft is trying to switch everyone over to its Expression Suite).

Sorry for taking the week off with my show. Rocky’s mom died on Sunday which put us behind. Thanks to Ryanne Hodson for filling in while Rocky’s tending to family affairs.

Comments

Available as a stand-alone software application or as a key component of Adobe Creative Suite 2, also announced, Illustrator CS2 enables designers to rediscover the power of vector graphics through exciting new creative tools — such as Live Trace and Live Paint — an enhanced user interface and expanded support for a variety of file formats, including Scalable Vector Graphics Tiny (SVG-t) for output to mobile platforms.

“With the introduction of Illustrator CS2, designers have unprecedented power over vector graphics with the ability to convert their hand-drawn images and color their artwork as it was intended and then deliver it to the medium of their choice,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief operating officer at Adobe. “Adobe Illustrator remains at the cutting edge of graphic design and with new features for mobile authoring it is an essential component to any design and publishing workflow.”

Breakthrough features expand creative possibilities and improve designer productivity. Live Trace easily and accurately converts scans of hand-drawn sketches and digital photos into fully editable and scaleable Illustrator artwork in seconds. Live Paint enables users to color artwork quickly and intuitively, based on how it appears on screen rather than how it was constructed. Live Paint also solves the common illustration challenge of quickly creating new shapes.

The new Control palette and Custom Workspaces in Adobe Illustrator CS2 help creative professionals discover new and existing tools and optimize their workspace and workflow. The Control palette, a context-sensitive interface that provides users convenient access to 80 percent of commonly used palettes from a single location, allows faster selection of menus and features and frees screen real estate for artwork. Custom Workspaces enable designers to select and arrange palettes to support a particular workflow or project save it as a named workspace and access it from the Window menu or share it with other designers.

Whether designing for print, the Web, or mobile platforms, Adobe Illustrator CS2 software makes it easy to collaborate creatively from first idea to final review. Illustrator CS2 offers expanded support for a wide variety of file formats, including industry-standard PDF/X for print workflows, Macromedia(R) Flash(TM) (SWF) for Web animations, and SVG, including SVG-t for applications such as animated picture messaging, mobile e-commerce, and mobile entertainment.

Adobe Illustrator CS2 provides tight integration with Adobe Photoshop(R) CS2 software through expanded support for Photoshop layer compositions and direct access to Filters and Effects. This added integration gives designers greater creative flexibility and control in workflows that span Adobe Creative Suite 2. Illustrator CS2 includes Adobe Bridge which functions as a hub for productivity, imagery and creativity, providing multi-view file browsing and smooth cross-product integration across Adobe Creative Suite 2 software. Adobe Bridge also provides access to Adobe Stock Photos, a new stock photography service that offers users one-stop shopping — across five elite stock image providers — to deliver high-quality, royalty-free images for layout and design.

Adobe Illustrator CS2 for Mac OS X version 10.2.8 through 10.3.8, Microsoft Windows 2000 with Service Pack 3 or 4 or Windows XP with Service Pack 1 or 2, will begin shipping in May to customers in the United States and Canada, and will be available through Adobe Authorized Resellers and the Adobe Store. International versions are expected to begin shipping in late May and early June. Estimated street price for the full version will be US$499 and upgrade pricing starts at US$169.

WebProNews | Breaking eBusiness News
Your source for investigative ebusiness reporting and breaking news.

Using Adobe Illustrator CS, you’ll get to enjoy lots of benefits. Its 3D capabilities will surely attract many new users because you can create custom 3D shapes and type treatments, add your desired lighting, and wrap your artwork around shapes for reproduction. Its PDF support will also delight web and print designers because you can now create native Adobe PDF files using settings and options consistent with Adobe Acrobat Distiller software.

You can therefore preserve separate layers in an exported PDF file that makes it possible for users to control the display of optional content, such as multilingual text or different versions of a design.
With it, you can also save 3-D attributes as a graphic style that include art board dimensions, styles, symbols, layers and many more for easy reuse. You can also start the design process by choosing from its wide range of pre-designed templates to create your desired artwork.

You can also easily create text-intensive layouts, set classy-looking type, and format individual characters, lines of type, or entire paragraphs on a single click with its new text composition controls, true paragraph and character styles, and other features. Truly, web designers can create elegant text with virtually no effort at all.

Adobe Illustrator CS also has the following advantages for amateur and professional web designers and graphic artists out there. You can easily distort and liquefy your artwork in any possible manner using the envelopes and live distortion tools. You can also utilize the pencil, smooth, erase and pen tools. You can also apply live effects without affecting your primary design and you can edit it any time without having to start all over again. You can also easily move between Illustrator and other Adobe products using the well-known Adobe user interface and integrate your artwork into other Adobe applications. You can also enjoy faster opening, saving and fine-tuning printing of files; copying and pasting; and displaying of your artwork thus, giving you fast and consistent print results.

Beyond Adobe Illustrator CS’s ability to work in a check-in, check-out production environment, its newly added awesome capabilities alone truly make it worth the recent improvement for existing and target users. Its retail price might be quite expensive, especially when it will be paired with Adobe’s very limited free technical support, but it is nevertheless a valuable upgrade.

We can’t deny the fact the 3-D functions of the Adobe Illustrator CS make it stand out among the others. However, it is the workaday PDF and print output that secures its position as the drawing program of choice in a print production workflow in the market.

For comments and questions about the article and the authyor you may contact The Large Format Posters Moderator at 888 888 4211 or visit http://www.largeformatposters.com