Tom Arah shows you how to uncover Adobe Illustrator’s creative depths.

Ten years ago today’s market-defining vector drawing package, Adobe Illustrator, was an underpowered embarrassment. Compared to pioneering rivals such as Xara and Expression (see previous article), Adobe’s flagship just wasn’t able to produce work with the same creative depth...

In short, despite its name, it wasn’t much good at illustration. That largely remains the view today, as vector artwork generally and Illustrator’s in particular, is seen as clinical, flat and lifeless: too clearly computer-generated. However, nowadays that perception is completely unfair. Work at it - and more importantly work with it - and these days Illustrator CS3 (free trial from adobe.com/downloads) can claim to be the most creatively exciting application on the planet – especially with a little help along the way (see Creative Xtras boxout)
First it’s necessary to understand why Illustrator’s default position is over-clinical, flat and lifeless. Draw a simple circle, scale it up massively and then zoom in on its edge and even at Illustrator CS3’s maximum 6400% magnification, the boundary looks pin sharp. That’s because the circle is described as a mathematical vector rather than as a fixed size bitmap grid of coloured pixels. Because Illustrator’s graphics are described programmatically as filled shapes and stroked paths via Adobe’s PostScript page description language, the same graphic program can be output at maximum quality at any size. This mathematical precision is precisely what Illustrator gave the world of PC graphics: pin-sharp resolution-independence.

By default Illustrator’s vector handling seems best-suited for flat technical illustration

The problem is that while crisp edges and solid fills are perfect for defining scalable typefaces for high-resolution imageset output, which is what PostScript was originally devised for, they are hardly ideal for creative graphics. For creative illustration, whether realistic or artistic, you really need rich fill and stroke formatting preferably leading on to integrated bitmap handling. But that wasn’t the view at Adobe. Illustrator’s great strength was its vector underpinning and so nothing must compromise Illustrator’s PostScript-only EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) output.

With a little lateral thinking, vector formatting can be made richer

And in a way Adobe was right. After all, PostScript’s filled shapes and stroked paths can be used to produce rich illustration - you just have to learn to think laterally and, as Illustrator does, in vectors. To turn our flat circle into a realistically shaded ball for example you can simply apply a vector-based, mathematically-defined elliptical gradient fill. Gradients are more advanced than flat solid fills but linear and radial effects are still extremely limiting and, if anything, even more clinical and clearly vector-based. However vectors are perfectly capable of producing far more flexible formatting. An alternative route to produce your shaded ball is to begin by drawing a second lighter overlapping circle offset from the centre. Select both circles and the Blend command (Alt+Ctrl+B) and, voila, your ball springs to apparent three-dimensional life. You can see how both gradient and blend effects are achieved by using the Object > Expand command to break up the smooth shading into the multiple intermediate shapes and shades (255 by default) that make them up. In fact by breaking down colour changes into multiple coloured objects like this, you can produce remarkably subtle shading.
Once you get into the vector frame of mind, a whole range of other more advanced effects becomes possible. Draw an outlined ellipse, for example, and its uniform width screams out its vector nature. However again use Illustrator’s Expand command and you can turn the stroke into a filled shape. Using the Direct Selection tool, you can then move the outline’s individual defining control points to make the stroke appear more fluid. Illustrator even offers a dedicated Tweak filter to manipulate multiple nodes simultaneously (deselect Anchor Points keep the effect smooth). The psychological impact is extraordinary - immediately the circle stops looking scientifically precise and begins to feel more human. It’s the difference between an illustration that that looks hand-drawn compared to one output by a plotter.
Similar lateral thinking can also produce vector-only versions of the most common formatting effects. While each object is limited to a solid or gradient fill, for example, there’s nothing to stop you building up far more advanced fills with multiple objects. Create some multi-coloured circles, for example, and then drag them onto the Swatches panel and you can now instantly apply your new polka dot pattern to any object. To produce a drop shadow effect, meanwhile, simply offset a duplicated version of the circle, darken it and send it behind the original. You can even create a basic transparency effect, say for a logo. Overlay two solid colour circles (no outlines please), copy and paste them in front (Ctrl+F) and then Alt+Click on the Intersect option in Illustrator’s Pathfinder palette’s to create a new object over the overlap. Using the Colour palette you can then mix up and apply a CMYK colour midway between the two to produce a 50% transparency effect.

Illustrator 8 introduced subtle gradient mesh colour handling

The great strength of Illustrator’s vector-only approach is that the results remain fully scalable and resolution-independent, even when exported to EPS or PDF and then output from a DTP application. You can use the same logo to produce inkjet handouts, for example, or as part of an imageset billboard-size advert and in each case the results will be as sharp as the output medium allows. As such it’s no wonder that such vector handling tricks as blending, expanding and pattern handling remain the stock-in-trade of the advanced Illustrator user even today.
However no-one could say that such lateral thinking is easy for beginners, or ever feels natural. More importantly, such handling throws away much of vector handling’s other great strength: control and editability. Once you’ve broken a stroke down into a shape, for example, you can’t easily tweak the path it follows – and if you change the shapes involved in a pathfinder-based transparency effect you’ll have to recreate the effect from scratch. In short, even in Illustrator’s seventh release, almost all the hard work involved in trying to make vector handling creative was devolved onto the end user. Most importantly, while stretching the envelope like this certainly offers improved end results, they still aren’t great. Laboriously producing a logo with a little bit of hand-drawn flair and a transparency effect, is one thing: but you only had to look at a photo-realistic illustration produced with Xara or a high impact work of art produced with Expression to realize how far Illustrator 7 had fallen behind.
Finally Adobe cottoned on to how out of touch Illustrator had become and in two extraordinary releases it completely reinvented its drawing flagship. The great challenge – and ultimately Illustrator’s greatest success – was to graft on this new creative power without throwing the vector baby out with the bathwater. The first small sign of Illustrator’s new creative depth and approach was version 8’s new live handling of vector-based blends which meant that you could now update end colours and path and leave Illustrator to automatically update the blend accordingly.
Rival packages had long offered similar handling, but Illustrator 8 broke entirely new ground with its gradient meshes. The obvious limitation of blends is that they are based on just two end colours and shapes. Select the new Gradient Mesh tool however and you can click anywhere in a shape to create a point to which new arbitrary colours can be applied. The process isn’t exactly intuitive but it does mean that you can create far more advanced fills – say to produce the more subtle colour shifts and shading seen in a realistic apple or flower rather than an idealized ball. Moreover Illustrator and PostScript 3 (which introduced dedicated Smooth Shading capabilities) do all the really hard work behind the scenes breaking the gradient effect up into all the necessary coloured shapes based on the final output linescreen to minimize visible banding – meaning that within Illustrator the gradient mesh remains scalable, resolution-independent and editable.
Illustrator 8 didn’t just improve the formatting of filled shapes; it transformed open path formatting with its introduction of the Brushes palette. This offers four main brush types: Calligraphic, where the nib of the pen can be angled to automatically produce fluid lines; Scatter, where elements are scattered around the stroke; Pattern, where four pattern blocks are used to create graphical border patterns; and, the most regularly-useful, Art, where a single pattern is stretched out along the length of the path. In each case Illustrator is actually applying vector-defined shapes along the open path, again ensuring pin-sharp scalability. Even better, because Illustrator tracks the connection between shapes and path, you can easily edit the path or the stroke’s colour or brush settings, only using the Expand command to break each path up into its component constituents when you need absolute node-based control. The end results and level of control aren’t quite up there with Expression (you can’t use bitmap brushes, for example, or mix repeating and fixed elements) but applying brushes adds entirely new creative dimensions to Illustrator artwork.

Illustrator 9 introduced vector-friendly transparency and blend mode handling

An even bigger transformation arrived with Illustrator 9 in the form of the Transparency palette. This small and unassuming addition lets you quickly apply an opacity level or blend mode to an object, group or layer. It might not sound that extraordinary but it immediately opens up whole new vistas of creative possibilities – just try overlaying some circles filled with the polka dot pattern and then setting blend modes to Exclusion or Difference. Even better, Illustrator also lets you apply the graduated transparency and blend effects that are crucial to producing the subtle glass and shadow effects necessary for truly realistic illustration by using objects with gradients, or even gradient meshes, as opacity masks. Such transparency handling is nowhere near as direct or as fast as Xara provides, but the level of control is even stronger.
More importantly, Xara’s blisteringly fast transparency handling is possible because it is happy to convert its vector objects to bitmaps; Illustrator however hates resorting to bitmaps. Instead it manages to keep everything vector-based wherever possible (and so scalable, resolution-independent and editable) by “flattening” artwork on output. This is effectively the same process discussed above of isolating intersections and creating new shapes filled with the appropriate colour as necessary – but done automatically for as many objects as needed. It’s the same system of breaking down objects into discrete elements that underlies Illustrator’s ability to keep blends and gradient meshes as vectors. The downside is that there’s a price to pay in terms of processing on output – imagine the number of objects involved in rendering a pattern fill with a gradient mask opacity applied - which is why Illustrator lets you choose the point at which complex artwork is rasterized via flattening presets. Generally though it’s a brilliantly effective system allowing users to work at a higher, more creative, level of abstraction and leaving Illustrator to do all the hard work behind the scenes.
The introduction of vector-friendly transparency and blend mode handling was such a watershed event that it tended to overshadow Illustrator 9’s other creative advances though in many ways these were even more significant – and remain unique. First up was the conversion of Illustrator’s various transformation, distortion, offsetting, warp and pathfinder filters to new non-destructive effects. Draw a circle for example and you can Apply the Roughen effect with a low size setting for example to give it a more fallible, lopsided effect, while a high setting will turn it into a jagged sunburst. The huge difference is that you can still edit the simple high-level circle, say squashing it into an ellipse, rather than the low-level complex effect and you can always retrospectively change the effects settings.
Being able to apply vector effects non-destructively was a great step forward - especially as Adobe later added some extraordinary new power in the form of 3D and artistic Scribble effects - but Illustrator 9 didn’t stop there. After recognizing that dealing with bitmaps is sometimes inevitable when creatively desirable, Adobe took the plunge and introduced dedicated non-destructive bitmap-based effects. For starters it imported the vast majority of Photoshop’s wide range of artistic, blur and sharpen effects. Apply the Artistic > Cutout effect to Illustrator’s default wave pattern and the results are much more stylized and characterful. Even better, Adobe introduced dedicated Feather and Drop Shadow effects. As true bitmap effects complete with soft semi-transparency these are a million miles away from their vector-only equivalents meaning that Illustrator can produce artwork with bitmapped soft edges as well as vector hard.

Zoom in on an advanced graphic style and you’ll see that Illustrator can offer rich creative formatting in a primarily vector environment

With the powerful ability to apply non-destructive vector and bitmap effects, you need a way to control them. This is handled through another of Illustrator 9’s introductions, the Appearance palette, where all effects applied to the current object are listed. You can simply drag to reorder effects, click on the trashcan to remove them, or double-click to call up the relevant filter dialog to retrospectively change settings. As well as effects, transparency, blend modes and the current fill and stroke are shown which adds huge new power as it means that you can apply different settings to the fill and the stroke.
More importantly, the Appearance palette enables another of Illustrator 9’s great creative innovations: hidden away in the palette’s submenu are commands for adding new fills and strokes. By default any additions simply overlie and so hide those below so there might seem very little point. However, by applying different effects, opacities and blend modes you can quickly build up some extraordinarily rich formatting. Draw another circle and apply one of the two default colour gradient fills that Illustrator offers in the Swatches palette and one of the two Art brushes from the Brushes palette and then use the Appearance palette add a new fill and new stroke. You’re now ready for a bit of creative exploration. First select the top fill and set its blend mode to Colour Burn in the Transparency panel and then apply each of Illustrator’s pattern and gradient fills from the Swatches palette in turn. Now select the top stroke and apply an Offset Path or Roughen effect and then apply the other default art, calligraphic and scatter brush styles.
Illustrator’s range of swatches and brushes is extremely limited by default – see boxout - but when you start mixing them together and adding effects you soon get an idea of the sheer range of possible end results. In fact the big danger is that there is just too much creative territory to explore and manage. Which is where the last of Illustrator 9’s great innovations comes in: graphic styles. Once you’ve built up an object appearance that you like you can simply drag the object onto the Graphic Styles palette and all its fill, stroke, effect, opacity and blend mode settings are recorded. To instantly and consistently apply the same rich formatting simply open the library that contains the graphic style and drag it onto the desired object.
Using graphic styles lets you instantly tap into Illustrator’s extraordinary range and depth of creative formatting possibilities. Create a blank CMYK document, draw another circle (your last) and apply the first of the few default graphic styles that Illustrator offers. Instantly your circle springs to creative life looking like a soft, hand-drawn, multi-coloured cross-hatched sketch – about as far away from the hard edges and flat fills that typify vector artwork as it’s possible to imagine. Open up the Appearance palette to see just how the effect has been created and you’d probably expect to see that one of Illustrator’s brush-based Photoshop filters has been applied. Of course that is an option but in fact the style is built up from multiple overlaid gradient fills each with its own retrospectively editable opacity setting and Scribble effect. Zoom in to 6400% as we did with that first flat colour circle and you’re in for a surprise: the soft hand-drawn bitmap-style effect is actually built up of dozens of semi-transparent overlapping lines that Illustrator will output as hundreds of discrete vector objects each of whose edges remains absolutely pin sharp.
Illustrator is no longer tied to vector handling whatever the creative cost as it once was. However the program’s greatest strength is to show that, with a little bit of lateral thinking and behind-the-scenes work on its part, vector handling can add unparalleled creative richness to all its other virtues.

Creative Xtras

Through its pattern and gradient fills, brushes and styles, Adobe Illustrator offers a near-endless range of creative formatting options. Or rather it should do. Bizarrely though, by default the program offers just ten brushes, an odd collection of six graphic styles and a measly couple of gradient and pattern fills hidden away amongst the colours in the Swatches palette. No doubt it’s a deliberate decision to streamline memory requirements, but I have the horrible feeling that it means that most users simply don’t appreciate the breadth and depth of power on offer.
Thankfully the recent Illustrator CS3 release made a huge advance on this front by promoting the Open Library command away from each palette’s submenu to become the first command icon on the panel itself. This means it’s now simple to access the wide range of sample libraries that Adobe provides from each of the Swatches, Brushes and Graphic Style panels. Draw a quick line drawing and then apply the various brushes from the options in the Artistic_Ink library, for example, to instantly turn your scribble into a range of artworks each with their own very different feel.
Once you’ve seen the instant and extraordinary transformations that applying patterns, brushes and styles enables, the whole process quickly becomes addictive. So where’s the best place to score some more? The dealer to turn to is long-term PC Pro reader, Andrew Buckle, who provides a massive range on his www.graphicxtras.com site. The pricing is addictive too with individual libraries of hundreds of items for just £6 exc VAT and bundled collections of thousands for just £17.

www.graphicxtras.com is a great source of creative Illustrator content

Bitmap Fills

It looks like there’s one obvious omission from Illustrator’s creative formatting options – tiling bitmap (as opposed to vector) fills. In fact the capability is there, Adobe just chooses to play it down. Simply load a bitmap tile, embed it in the current document and then drag it onto the Swatches panel and your texture fill is ready to apply.