Adobe Illustrator CS3 New Features Show Great Improvement

Adobe Illustrator has always been a great program. As a designer you can imagine I’m a bit excited with the recent release of Adobe CS3 Creative Suite. Not only has Illustrator been expanded upon to include some of the coolest options, tools, and add-ons, but all its associated programs have also been improved, namely Flash.

I design almost exclusively in Illustrator, more so than Photoshop. Photoshop is great for image manipulation, but Illustrator proves better for layout as well as moving and creating objects. If vector is something that interests you, you may want to try designing in Illustrator. Vector is the use of mathematical equations to represent an image. The major advantage of this is scalability. Web and design trends are leaning more and more toward vector based images.

The new Illustrator has a few new features that stand out. The most obvious improvement is the entire user interface. Highlighted anchor points make point selection super simple while the ability to group colors in the color swatch palette is a great addition. The new Crop Area tool allows easy cropping and the new Erase tool functions just as its counterpart in Photoshop does, regardless of object anchor points.

Maybe the best feature is the integration with Flash. CS3 is the first release with Flash completely under the Adobe brand and it shows. Now just select an object or group in Illustrator, Cmd+C (or Ctrl+C on PC), open Flash and paste (Cmd+V or Ctrl+V on PC) and the exact object will copy perfectly into Flash. If a group was copied, double click to go down into the object just like a normal Flash movie clip.

There are many more features that I have yet to discover or stumble upon in CS3, but what I have seen so far impresses me beyond my expectations for the program. I can’t wait to delve deeper into CS3 and see what I can find.