Turbomilk

Five reasons for migrating to the new Illustrator CS4

Author: Dmitri Joukov
13 May 2009

All new stuff is extremely lucrative: it lures a feeling of novelty and freshness. I sincerely believe that a newer version is always better than the previous one. But there is one software package that undermines my life views. I am talking about Adobe Illustrator. It gained so many useless functions that operational mistakes have become too easy to see. It all lasted for six passed years. Here is an appropriate time for a short sermon.

Alleluia! The God does exist, my creative brothers and sisters. And our prayers have been heard. The God rested upon the Adobe’s coders and punished the sinners with all the vengeance and Illustrator have been healed. Amen.

A few months passed since the introduction of the latest version of Illustrator. The software has completed the test-drive successfully. Let’s consider the main improvements one-by-one. There will be a total of five.

1. It is the best Illustrator so far

Illustrator was always famous for its spontaneous seizures at the most inconvenient moments in time. Sometimes it behaved as an IT retard. In CS4 this was practically solved. And you would not believe if I told you that it did not fail to operate even once since then. Both Mac and PC versions work flawlessly.

2. Gradients

Now you do not have to target too hard in order to imagine how the gradients gonna look like. They are shown above the objects now shaped as a special bar once you pick the required tool. Coloring, placement and the number of pivot points can be changed right on an object. What happened to the radial gradients is really hard to describe. You can not only shift the center but make the elliptic gradient with a move of a mouse. Old-timers say that it used to be accessible in the past but did you really know how to go about it?

3. Transparency in the gradients

Each point in the gradient can be made transparent now. Dreams of many generations of designers have finally come true. Adobe really bought out Macromedia for a purpose.

4. Appearance bar

If you did not have a chance to use this bar, now it’s the right time to start using it. In short, this is the fourth dimension of the Illustrator, sort of like layers inside one object. Each object can feature several types of filling, text floating and effects. The latter BTW can be featured not only on its own object but with segregate filling in and text floatings. All of this was present in the previous versions as I remember it. In CS4 the Appearance bar finally has been revived. First, it stopped failing like it did. Secondly, right now every item has an eye as with layers. In addition you can edit colors right from here including colors, gradients and transparency.

5. Working area

Let me remind you that one of our small know-hows has always been working with multiple screens (two or three). We used to adjust the sizes manually. The windows were overlapping each other and caused headaches. Now we are cured: we turn on the “single working environment” mode (on Macs, Windows version has this mode on at all times). Then we organize windows as we think fit by dragging them to the header. They stick to all sides of a working area and to each other. Users can also use the preset templates. Thank you again for buying Macromedia.

And what pleases or frustrates you in the new Illustrator?