RECOMMENDED

VERDICT New gradient handling, vector painting, rich formatting and – at last – support for multiple pages/artboards.

Over the years Illustrator has become almost as dominant when it comes to vector handling as Photoshop is for pixels. However the program has never inspired the same devotion and is generally seen as allowing the technicalities to get in the way of creativity. With this CS4 release Adobe is determined to make the program work on the side of its users, not against them.
This starts with the Illustrator CS4 interface which offers a workspace switcher with more preset workspaces to choose from, tabbed documents and the ability to easily split the screen and control which layout appears in which window. The interface is also now more proactive – drag a group onto the Symbol panel icon, for example, and it springs open to allow you to drop the selection onto the library. Smart Guides have also been made more intelligent and helpful with more feedback.
The biggest change to Illustrator’s working environment, and indeed its whole approach to drawing, is the reworking of Isolation Mode handling. This sounds intimidatingly technical – typically - but the underlying idea is relatively straightforward: to allow you to work on isolated selections while the surrounding artwork is dimmed and made unselectable. Previously isolation mode was limited to symbols and groups but now the idea has been extended to images, gradient mesh objects, clipping paths, compound paths and paths themselves. Even better, Isolation Mode now shows a breadcrumb path – eg Layer > Group > Clipping Path > Path – which is selectable so that you can quickly back-out to work at higher levels. Once you get used to it, this double-click-drill-through approach to drawing proves invaluable, especially for complex artwork where it ensures that new objects are added where they should be in the layer stack.

Other major advances include isolation mode, blob brushes and improved control over object appearance and styling.

Another area that has been reworked to make it both more powerful and more intuitive is Illustrator’s gradient handling. Previously this was an awkward affair involving setting parameters and colour stops in the separate Gradient panel; now all that control is moved onto the object itself. When defining colour stops you can also now set an opacity level which makes it much easier to created simple graduated transparency effects.
Illustrator CS4 also sees new naturalistic drawing power in the form of new Blob brushes. Normally brushes in Illustrator lay down lines as stroked paths, but with the Blob brush you lay down a filled shape so it’s more like painting than drawing. And, as with paint, where strokes of the same colour overlap they combine into a single object. It’s not quite as revolutionary as Adobe is claiming as Flash 1 offered similar handling, but for painting-style illustration it’s a liberating release.

Cs4illustratorartboards.png: Artboards finally provide multiple page-style handling for Illustrator CS4.

The biggest sign that Adobe has really been listening to its users is that Illustrator CS4 at last adds multiple page support – or rather multiple artboard support. Create a new file and you can now ask Illustrator to create multiple artboards, or you can use the new Artboard tool to create them as you work. These aren’t typical pages as most people think of them as they all appear onscreen simultaneously. Moreover, without features such as automatic text flow, master elements and so on, Illustrator isn’t competing directly with InDesign for producing multiple-page publications. However you can quickly page through artboards using the new Artboard Navigator at the bottom of the document window and, when you print or export to PDF, each artboard can be output as its own page.
Where Illustrator’s artboards come into their own is when handling multiple variations of the same design as they are all on view at the same time. Using the Artboard tool it is very easy to copy existing artboards and to create new ones to any size or to fit existing artwork, for example to quickly rework the same advert for different column widths. When exporting you can then choose which artboards to output or, when placing native AI files in the other CS4 apps, you can now select which artboard to import.
Perhaps the biggest benefit of artboards is that they help ensure that layout variations share the same overall look and feel. Also useful in this regard is Illustrator CS4’s Appearances panel which has been completely reworked to make it a powerful control centre for advanced formatting. Click on the new Stroke, Fill and Effect command icons and you can rapidly build up a rich object appearance, setting many parameters such as stroke width and fill colour directly in the panel. You can also now hide the display of processor-intensive effects as you work. When happy with your object’s appearance, you can quickly save it to the Graphic Styles panel for re-use and you can now Alt+click to overlay multiple styles on an object.
Once you’ve created your artwork, you need to output it. Illustrator’s background is in high-end PostScript-based commercial print and here the new Separations Preview will be particularly welcome letting you view individual colour separations onscreen. And for screen-based output Illustrator CS4 adds support for the new XML-based Flash image format FXG.
It’s unlikely that Illustrator CS4 will win over its critics as, compared to rivals such as Xara and CorelDRAW, the program is still heavy going. Ultimately however the level of advanced creative control that Illustrator offers is unmatched and this CS4 release both adds important new functionality and makes existing power more accessible.
Tom Arah

EASE OF USE 4/6
FEATURES 6/6
VALUE FOR MONEY 4/6
OVERALL 5/6

Requirements: Windows XP (SP2), Vista