Motivation: Adobe Illustrator CS2 - Beyond the Bridge
Features: A review of some of the features that make Illustrator compelling

Along with Corel Draw, Adobe Illustrator was one of the original vector draw programs from the earliest days of Windows and mac respectively. Both have been on the forefront of commercial drawing and illustration work with Illustrator having a notable advantage in the latter arena with its close connectos Postscript and then Adobe PDF files.

Of late Illustrator has started to gain some traction in the Web graphics arena. Because many product designs and pakaging is done in Illustrator's native vector format, they can be easily translated to the web with advantge of compact file size and the ability to scale up or down by factors of n and still retain image fidelity unlike bitmap images which become jaggy or blurred when n=2 or greater. Illustrators use of symbols further save space and adds speed because one draw symbol can be used mutiple times on a canvas.

As well a new feature of Illustrator is Live Trace which converts bitmap images to vector. Live Trace certainly does not have the range of features and modes that Corel Trace; but combined with the new Live Paint it does allow photofinishers to take a new approach to their images - similar to the Posterize or Levels operations in PhotoPaint or Photoshop but with much more control available to the artist. The screenshot above shows the degree of control offered.

A number of specialized effects are provided for the Web image developer including doing slicing of combined vector with bitmap fills for controlling major splash page and artwork downloads. SVG effects allow appying drop shadows, blurs and smoothing which retain sharpness when viewed in SVG viewers. Selective antialiasing allows users to turn off antilaliasing. Finally, just like in Image Ready CS2 there are side-by-side previews of various optimized images and web pages so developers can fine tune their final page images.

These can be powerful tools but there is caution here for all the graphic vendors. Many of these elaborate image effect measures could be bypassed if Microsoft, Opera, Mozilla and other browser vendors uniformly supported JPEG2000, PNG, and SVG. These would provide standardized flexibility in delivering either the most compact images or the images with the best possible quality.

Creating Images

Creating images in Adobe llustrator is both automated and a touch too simple.

Let me explain what I mean. There are two principal drawing tools in Illustrator - the pencil and the Pen. In addition there is a wealth of automated drawing tools:
 - line, arc, spiral, grid, polar graph =>
 - rectangle, ellipse, polygon, rounded rectangle, star, flare =>
 - symbol sprayer tool (below is a sample of symbols that can be sprayed on an image)

 - Live Trace tool that converts bitmap images into vector curves
This is afairly robust collection of automated illustration and drawing tools rivaling such powerhouses as Corel Draw and Macomedia Freehand.

The first two groups of tools all have 5 settings when drawing. Each tool allows settings for:

1)a stroke color and size;

2)a fill color, gradient or pattern setting(example below is a selection of Fill Patterns);

3)a brush type including dozens of library brushes;

4)an opacity setting that applies equally to fill, stroke and brush;
5)a style which will override the above 4 settings - because a style is just a saved set of stroke, fill, opacity and brush settings.

This automated capability is enhanced by the fact that it is simple for users to add their own Symbols, Brushes, Fill Patterns, and Styles created quickly in Illustrator to the existing libraries and swatches. So savvy pros quickly build up a set of customized designs that they throughout while working with Illustrator.

There is one glaring weakness here. Although users can define bitmap images for use in Patterns, subsequent control of those Patterns by resizing, rotating and other pattern settings available in Xara X1 or Corel Designer are totally lacking in Illustrator. In general, Adobe seems to have deliberately assigned the primary role for integrating bitmap and vector drawing tools to its Photoshop product. this leaves it behind such tools as ACDsee Canvas, Corel Designer , the new Microsoft Acrylic and especially Xara X1.

Nontheless, I hope it is abundantly clear that for drawing and illustrating, the automated and customizable tools make for fast and productive work. This is especially true with Symbols which users can easily add their own sets of to the library. Symbols have a complete flyout set of commands in the toolbox for further customization and control. They also have the advantage of space savings because Illustrator stores the image data for the first Symbol, then just the location, rotation, and opacity data for subsequent copies.

The Draw Factor

Despite these automation aids, one of the problems I find with all drawpackage is the too simple sate they have left the basic drawing tools in. They are a touch too simple. For example, Ilustrator has the Pen and Pencil tools - curve and freehand based drawing. Illustrator also has a Simplify command and Smooth tool that allows users to do just that to paths. Smooth tool works by tracing over the portion of the curve they want simplified. The simplify command works on the selected path.

As well users can Smooth while drawing with the Pencil tool by holding down the ALT key. And double clicking the Smooth tool one can set the smoothing options. But Macromedia Freehand goes two better by allowing users to have three Freehand settings - straightline, smoothed, and full freehand. These setting can be changed while drawing by pressing on the ALT, SHIFT, or CTL keys. Corel Designer alerts users when they are coming close to touching tangentially, being perpendicular to, or crossing another path or curve. Also Designer signals when near an anchor point. This is very useful for closing off paths or curves. Finally, Microsoft Visio allows users to create end points which are sensitive to being joined with lines - when the the two come within a threshold radius they are automatically joined.

None of the vendors mentioned above, including Illustrator, do a good job of allowing during drawing users to choose whether close endpoints or crossed curves should be joined. Neither do they allow a richness of choices of how two curves should be joined. One can immediately think of at least 4-6 join options:

However, for vectors there are a wealth of powerful transforms and effects available to the graphic artist. For transformations developers have (note underlined apply to Symbols too):

Layers and Type

So far Illustrator has resisted two trends in draw programs. The first we have already noted - it has been slow to integrate bitmaps within the vector framework. True, it is relatively easy to include bitmaps as natural rectangles and then use Object | Clip Mask to crop them with novel shapes. And the cropped bitmaps remain editable using the broad set of Illustrator bitmap filters and effects. But the ways to map bitmaps to vector surfaces are primitive in the effects | 3D Map Area commands. And Fill patterns are easy to make but have virtually no control and the bitmaps become uneditable.

And the second area which lacks bitmap features is in layering. In Photoshop, PhotoPaint and most bitmap editing programs the blending and masked transparency between layers is one of the key methods of creating powerful compositions. Neither blending modes nor sophisticated gradient or masked layer transparency is available. Users can use Object and group opacity to achieve some transparency effects.

The Transparency Window does not afford the user control over the interaction between layers. Rather it allows control over the color blending mode and opacity of any object. But movement of layers does change the back-to front arrangement of objects. As a layer is moved up, its objects also move forward en masse in the arrangement of objects; and as the layer moves down so too, its objects move back. In sum, Illustrator has made its transparency and blending object based and not layer-based as in Photoshop and other bitmap programs.

The other trend that Illustrator is bucking is the tendency to create DTP capabilities within a Draw program. Corel Draw and ACDSee Canvas have particularly followed this trend with Master pages, templates, and connected text boxes which can overflow text from box to another. Illustrator does support paragraph text but it also offers two modes for mapping text to a path and also has the same operations for vertical text as for horizontally displayed. Also its is easy to deposit text within any vector object by just clicking with the text tool on its perimater. In short, Text is predominately artistic in nature in Illustrator.

Summary

Illustrator is a a very well automated vector draw program that is beginning to integrate in bitmap images in a much more sophisticated way. One can be very productive within Illustrator with its clever use of stroke and brush, opacity and blend mode and a variety of automated fills. Symbols save not just file space but also time since they are very easy to create in the course of drawing, can be saved for later reuse, and with the Symbol Sprayer - they are easy to deploy. We did not discuss the output formats in detail, but Illustrator suports a wealth of bitmap and vector option including new SWF Flash file output, Tiny-SVG for mobile phones, as well as PDF and EPS. In sum, Illustrator offers aversatile draw environ well tied into Adobe Photoshop, InDesign and GoLive programs through Adobe Bridge and Cue Version.

But like so many other draw programs, Illustrator is good but only as a partial tool. For bitmap integration look to Xara X1, for DTP and graphic brochures look to ACDSee Canvas, for technical drawing and draughtsmanship look to Corel Draw and Designer, and so on. I would like to settle on one tool, but unlike bitmap processing where Corel PaintShop Pro and Adobe Photoshop are the emerging mainstays, there is no dominate player in market.

But with Microsoft entering the field with Acrylic and the need to map bitmap images to 2D and 3D surfaces in more sophisticated ways, look for the race for the best vector graphics tools to heat up in the coming year. Illustrator is well positioned with its automated drawing virtuosity, close and well integrated ties to the CS2 programs, and a whole slew of new vector draw features and expertise coming on board with the Macromedia Fireworks and Freehand teams after the merger of Adobe and Macromedia. I know Illustrator will continue to garner a good percentage of my vector drawing time now and in the near future.