Software
Review
Illustrator 10
by
Kathleen McGuinness
Though I haven’t used Illustrator since version 7, except for layers
– more on that later– I had no trouble. This is partly because of the familiar across-the-board Adobe interface.
It appears that Illustrator in making head way with animators. I found this out by accident. I was in Starbucks seeing me holding an Illustrator 10 library book. By the way my library had four books on Illustrator 10. That tells you something about how popular the program is. But anyway, back to Starbucks. Seeing the book a man stopped me to find out if it was any good. Turns out he was an animator who’d just upgraded to 10. He uses Illustrator to jump start his Flash to Maya work.
Me, I mostly use Photoshop for illustration these days. But when I found out how much better Illustrator works for clean line work I switched. And of course Illustrator does a nice copy-paste to Photoshop. Caveat; ya gotta change the preferences depending on what you want to copy.
• To copy pixel based art into Photoshop you have go to preferences>files & clipboard and make sure to check PDF, the default.
• To copy paths AICB must be checked.
But of course you can do much more in Illustrator 10 than line work using the drawing tools and modifying them with Illustrator’s Pathfinder and maintain your vector art. But if you do need to rastorize your art you can do it in Illustrator, which comes with many of the same layer styles and filters that Photoshop is famous from.
One of the features that Illustrator has that Photoshop doesn’t is a blend tool. It’s gotten much more sophisticated and allows you to create complicated artwork using shapes or lines. But layers in Illustrator can grow rapidly. Here is where the layers I hated initially come in. Every single object you create on any layer has its own sub-layer. Until you get used to this it can be overwhelming when you click on the little arrow on the right side of your layer bar, opening dozens of layers within layers. But once I got used to sub-layers I loved them because I could select any item anywhere including below other elements. All I had to do was option or (alt-PC) click on a layer or sublayer to select it. But Adobe’s layers could still take a page from Freehand 9. With Freehand 9 you can group multiple layers. Later, if you need to ungroup them the layers will drop back to their original positioning layer order. Ungroup Illustrator 10 layers, and they all stay on the single layer they were grouped on. A tough one if you do mapping.
But Illustrator offers great web tools, including a full optimization
palette that rivals Photoshop’s. And recently I designed a series of logos. I did three in Photoshop and one in Illustrator, then put them on the web. The Illustrator weighed in as a 7k gif and looked fantastic with great colored drop shadows. The Photoshop ended up 37k jpgs. Okay they were jpgs, but still a 30k savings in nothing to sneeze at.
My final opinion: Illustrator is a wonderful compliment to Adobe’s
suite of software.