Adobe Illustrator

For many years, Adobe Illustrator has set the standard for drawing programs in the print production environment, and with good reason. This professional graphics program offers powerful vector drawing tools, clean PostScript output, and tight integration with Adobe Photoshop. Version 10.0 also offers more powerful new drawing and automation tools, such as editable warping effects and symbols (adaptable masters of objects or images). Macromedia FreeHand still remains a better choice if you are looking for synergy with Flash, the leading authoring program for Web animation. And if you're new to illustration tools, check out CorelDraw instead. But for an all-around drawing program that's suitable for print and Web output, nothing beats Illustrator.

An Adobe family likeness
Illustrator 10.0 sports the standard Adobe interface, in which creative tools (such as the Bezier pen), object attributes (such as color), and management functions (such as layers) reside on floating palettes. Anyone who has worked with Photoshop or InDesign will immediately feel comfortable with Illustrator.

Symbols do it faster
Illustrator 10.0's new support of symbols makes it easier to create and update complex drawings. Symbols in Illustrator behave much as they do in other drawing programs, including Macromedia FreeHand: You create an object (such as a six-pronged gear), define it as a symbol, store the symbol in a palette, then place multiple instances of the symbol throughout a document. When you modify the master symbol (the one in the palette), all other instances in the drawing automatically update as well.

Unlike other drawing programs, however, Illustrator 10.0 elevates symbols from having a strictly organizational function to a creative, artistic tool. The companion Symbolism tools let you create and manipulate multiple instances of symbols simultaneously. Using specialized brushes, you can spray numerous copies of a symbol and vary its size, rotation, tint, and transparency. The Symbolism brushes provide an easy way to create randomized or natural-looking effects.

Design once, publish many times
With version 10.0, Illustrator finally integrates an important technology: data-driven graphics, which let you create templates that link back to a database. Then, using the new Variables palette, you simply designate an element in a document as a placeholder object and update or replace it from an external data source. For example, a Web designer might create a single graphic for a banner heading. Web programmers can then generate all of the different headers needed for a site simply by writing the code that links placeholder elements in the header to a text database. However, Illustrator does not offer any easy-to-use commands to link placeholders to data sources. Instead, programmers must use Visual Basic or AppleScript to create live links to an ODBC-compliant database.

Web still wanting?
Unfortunately for Web designers, there are still some gaps in Illustrator's Web arsenal. For example, Illustrator can't produce JavaScript rollovers or GIF animation. Instead, you must export your Illustrator creations to a Web graphics program such as Adobe ImageReady or Macromedia Fireworks.

Thankfully, however, this release does deliver several important new tools targeted exclusively at Web developers. Illustrator now lets you create HTML tables by slicing a drawing into sections. And because Illustrator lets you mix raster images, vector drawings, and HTML text in a single composition, your Web graphics look good and download quickly.

Illustrator 10.0 lets you add live Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) effects, such as drop shadows or Gaussian blurs to your illustrations with a few lines of code. SVG is a relatively new standard for Web graphics, but, when viewed in an SVG-enabled browser (plug-ins are available from Adobe) SVG graphics download quickly and always display at the highest possible resolution.

Lots of cool tools
You'll find that Illustrator 10.0 packs a wealth of new and specialized drawing tools into its palettes. On the most basic level, you can use the new Arc, Rectangular Grid, and Polar Grid tools to create open curves and complex matrices as easily as you draw a straight line. The new Liquefy brushes, such as Pucker or Crystallize, are basically filter effects that transform simple paths or text into jittery lines and exaggerated shapes. This method gives you much more control over the amount and location of the distortion than the existing Distort and Transform effects. And, for pure drama, nothing beats the new Flare tool, which generates the component parts of a lens flare effect--including halos and secondary rings--as vector objects.

When you purchase Illustrator 10.0, you get access to Adobe's professional-level, person-to-person telephone tech support for 90 days (30 days if you've upgraded from a previous version). Telephone support is available Monday through Friday, from 6 a.m. to 5 p.m., PT. Otherwise, you can access free help online in the form of comprehensive tech notes and user-to-user forums or via e-mail. Adobe also offers for-pay tech support options: toll numbers ($2 per minute for each call), a flat fee of $25 per incident, or the CustomerFirst yearly support contract.

If you're an amateur artist, you might find CorelDraw 10.0 (and the host of extra graphics programs bundled with it) easier to use. Flash developers will probably prefer FreeHand for its ability to work almost seamlessly with Flash. But if you're a professional designer or artist looking for a stable, powerful drawing program, look no further than Illustrator 10.0. Loyal Illustrator customers should consider upgrading for the symbols support alone.

Tradition dictates that within six months of Macromedia releasing an upgrade to FreeHand, Adobe must do the same for Illustrator, and with the same version number. At the moment, though, Illustrator 10 is looking like the better buy.

A key new feature of the upgrade is a new concept that Adobe calls symbolism. Most other illustration packages enable you to save a graphic as a symbol; that is, a template graphic sitting in a library palette to which copies in the layout are linked. At last Illustrator can do this too, keeping file sizes smaller and optimising Web layouts containing multiple objects (buttons, for example). But additionally, you can pour multiples of your selected symbol onto the page as a randomised group, drag them around, pull them closer together, then grow, shrink and rotate them.

Other tools enable you to re-colour symbols, apply transparency, and change their appearance based on selections in the Styles palette. Adobe's concept of symbolism is quite brilliant, not to mention a lot of fun to play with.

Summary
Adobe Illustrator 10, as you would expect, is an excellent tool for vector illustration. The $399 price tag is not unreasonable, though the upgrade price, at $149, might seem a bit steep for the relatively modest number offerings in the new features department. But, when you consider just how powerful and well implemented these new features are, $149 in fact is a small price to pay. The upgrade is an important one for its powerful new creative tools, workflow enhancements and, of course, OS X-native functionality. Illustrator is a program with depth and refinement and tools critical for both print and video applications. I give it a strong buy recommendation.

We're down to the last two major workflow enhancements in Illustrator 10. The first of these is the Magic Wand tool. The Magic Wand, to put it simply, allows you to select objects in your document with similar attributes. You can select multiple objects on your canvas just by clicking with the Magic Wand on one of them. The Wand Options palette allows you to specify which attributes to look for. These include fill color, stroke color, stroke weight, opacity and blending mode. Each of these options also allows you to specify a tolerance parameter, so selected objects can be identical to one another or merely similar by the degree you specify.

I found a limit to this tool though that kind of hurts its usefulness. It has trouble dealing with symbol instances. In other words, if you select a symbol with the Magic Wand tool, you're not going to get the behavior you expect. Even if you expand and ungroup a selection of instances, you're not going to be able to use the Magic Wand to select all of them. I'm hoping that this is an overlooked bug that will be rectified in the near future.

Now, I've saved what I think is the best for last--scripting. Some of you out there must have begun drooling when you heard about this. You are the hardest of the hardcore users, and you know exactly what it means to have not only the power of recordable actions (like those in Photoshop 6), but also support for the all-powerful technology of AppleScript.

I'm not going to pretend to be a scripting master. If you are one, scripting Illustrator probably isn't new to you; you could have previously picked up the Illustrator Software Developer's Kit to do this. But Illustrator 10 now offers some pretty comprehensive scripting support out of the box, including a robust AppleScript dictionary and a 494-page scripting guide in PDF format (plus errata and sample scripts).

Scripts in Illustrator 10 can be used not only for automation, but also to drive graphics with data, such as charts and graphs. According to Adobe, "virtually every" function in Illustrator 10 can be accessed through one of the supported scripting languages, which, aside from AppleScript, include JavaScript and, for Windows users, Visual Basic.

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