When it comes to software, Adobe Illustrator is considered to be the grizzled veteran of the design business, at least compared to many other applications. After all, how many apps do designers work with daily that can claim nearly 20 years of growth?

Illustrator has been around since 1987, and today, along with CorelDraw and Macromedia Freehand, is considered to be one of the de facto standards when creating vector graphics and text.

Now, with version CS (or version 11 for those who have to have a number), Adobe Systems Inc. adds some new features to bring the application in line with the rest of the Creative Suite in terms of compatibility and performance. How does it measure up?

New features

When Illustrator CS was announced at Adobe’s press conference last year, the feature that drew the most time and attention was the addition of some 3-D effects.

A new feature in Adobe Illustrator CS will display 3-D objects in both a fully rendered and, as seen here, a wireframe view.
Image: Adobe

3-D manipulation, of course, is nothing new. Adobe has offered Dimensions, an app that lets users extrude and modify text into 3-D space, for quite some time.

With Illustrator CS, Dimensions’ features have been rolled into the app. This parallels the course Adobe took with ImageReady, a stand-alone Web-graphics app whose features were incorporated into Photoshop.

Illustrator’s 3-D effects are impressive. As with many graphics features, however, the end result will depend almost entirely on the artistry of the person using them.

3-D text is a snap, and should serve to add some punch to otherwise by-the-numbers newspaper advertising, at least until everyone starts doing it or totally overuses the effect.

Objects are a little tougher. Making a 3-D object look truly photo realistic, as many dedicated 3-D designers from the video game and professional motion picture industries will attest, is no walk in the park. Entire software sets can be devoted to techniques such as bump mapping and vertex shading. Illustrator compensates by enabling a fairly sophisticated process: letting the user map artwork onto the 3-D surfaces and distort it to match the geometry of the objects.

Vector or raster

Impressively, the artwork can be both vector in origin (such as other Illustrator artwork), or it can be from raster files such as photographs imported from Photoshop. Of course, raster images don’t resize and scale based on the original geometry like a vector object does, so the results can vary wildly.

It’s also impressive that the 3-D effects are “live” at all times and allow changing of any of the variable effects no matter how deep into the composition they are. In other words, there is no “flattening” necessary to save a composition containing a 3-D object. The 3-D-specific data is written into the Illustrator file.

The 3-D feature set will no doubt prove useful to packaging designers and ad agencies that work frequently with ad design for physical objects as opposed to pure illustration and typography.

Seeing how a label will look on a close approximation to a bottle or package will certainly speed the design and approval process.

Adobe also seems proud of a new filter addition called Scribble Effect, which transforms vector text into an approximation of art that was hand-drawn.

Quite a few variables can be changed on the effect (stroke width, curviness, etc.) so it does allow a fair amount of customization. It can also be used as an irregular shape tool to create masks, as in the artificial outer border of a photograph.

Text handling better, but...

One of CS’ major improvements has been the introduction of a modified text engine. The last version of InDesign was equipped with this engine and now Illustrator incorporates it as well.

The advances in optical character alignment, kerning and the so-called “every line” composer (that looks at an entire line and makes adjustments on that basis) result in much better looking text in most situations.

Also borrowed from InDesign is the ability to set paragraph and character styles. Bulleted, indented and variously styled text is a mainstay in newspaper advertising design, so it’s nice to see features that make layout of these styles easier.

CS includes support for OpenType fonts. This standard, developed by Microsoft and Adobe, greatly expands the standard character set and takes advantage of Unicode character encoding. For the user, this can mean easier sharing of documents across the computer platforms as well as much easier access to the extended character sets that often accompany a font.

The one drawback to the new text engine is how it handles text from files saved in earlier versions. CS gives users the option to update the text, meaning it will automatically translate the text into the new format.

Yet text changes position when it reflows, which means users have to retweak the layout.

That said, the changes, in most cases, aren’t huge and the new text engine improves the tracking and kerning. Bottom line? Ultimately, it’s a change for the better. But be aware of this if you’re embarking on a project that requires changing tens or hundreds of Illustrator pages and you’re switching versions before you begin.

Templates help beginners

A new feature that was a smart addition on Adobe’s part is templates. For instance, if you want to create a restaurant menu and don’t know where to start, just select “File>New From Template>Templates>Restaurant.” Then you will be given a nice-looking template to start with, including background and foreground graphics and text.

Naturally, elements can be swapped in and out at will, but this provides a very nice-looking starting point for the Illustrator uninitiated or for the more advanced user facing a brain block.