Adobe Illustrator 10

Richard Price
16 October 2001

Adobe Illustrator 10 is now available for both Mac and Windows.

This vector graphics drawing program has become more complicated since it first appeared in 1988 and now sports integrated tools for creating, slicing and optimizing web graphics.

As vector based graphics programs battle to outdo each other with web-based enhancements it is hard to believe that the dot.com bubble has actually burst.

Illustrator 10 now integrates well with other Adobe programs such as PhotoShop, GoLive and LiveMotion.

PhotoShop users should find it easy to make their way around the Illustrator 10 interface.

New drawing tools were one of the first things to catch my eye. The product now includes four new drawing tools for lines, arcs and radial and rectangular grids.

The default options for these tools can be changed by clicking on the workspace which opens a dialogue box.

Drawing objects in perspective with Illustrator 10 is possible by creating guides using the Rectangular Grid Tool. It’s clumsy. I prefer the way Macromedia Freehand 10 allows users to drop objects onto a perspective grid.

The new Flare tool creates realistic-looking lens flares which remain vector objects.

Most vector graphic artwork is built up by adding and subtracting shapes from one another to create compound objects. In Illustrator 10 each shape remains editable making it much easier to modify compound objects.

Illustrator 10 provides support for symbols and symbol libraries. This is a great way of minimising file sizes since any graphic can be saved as a symbol and used repeatedly. Defining and working with symbols is done through the convenient Symbols palette and all instances of a symbol can be updated via the Redefine Symbol command.

Web graphics often consist of a larger design cut up into slices that fit into an HTML table. Illustrator’s Slice tools, similar to those found in PhotoShop or ImageReady, help simplify the process. Different format and compression options can be applied to each slice. Illustrator supports GIF, JPEG, PNG, SVG and SWF (FLASH) formats. If a slice contains a text block, it can be saved as plain HTML text

There is also support for Cascading Style Sheet (CSS) layers making it possible to create transparent or overlapping layers and control which layer is visible when the page is viewed in a browser.

Creating Flash files is possible but animations cannot be viewed in Illustrator, they have to be exported. When exporting to Flash, Illustrator includes an option to generate the associated HTML file so the animation can be viewed in a browser equipped with the Macromedia Flash Player.

Adobe believes in scaleable vector graphics (SVG) so the option of importing or exporting SVG files is included.

For those already using earlier versions of Illustrator, this is a worthwhile upgrade.

New users will be able to blend, twist, warp and distort objects with ease as they become familiar with the possibilities of this program.

Overall, I think Illustrator 10 emphasises web related enhancements at the expense of those creating vector graphics.

An automatic dimensioning feature would have been a useful touch --- CorelDraw has been doing it for years. Maybe Adobe is too busy watching the Macromedia camp to have noticed!

Price AU$1168; upgrade AU$359
www.adobe.com

By Richard Price, Editor, EnergyME.com

For information on getting a product reviewed email richard@energyme.com