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This article is from May 25, 2000, and is no longer current.

The Creative Toolbox: A First Look at Illustrator 9.0

10

Many die-hard Illustrator users still view Illustrator 5.5 as the best version Adobe ever released: It provided us with the tools we needed while offering up just enough bells and whistles to keep most of us happy. Illustrator 9.0 may not supplant version 5.5 as the good-ol’-days version of choice, but judging from the beta copy I tested, it adds much more in the way of major features than any Illustrator release since 5.5.

Transparency, At Last
When Illustrator 8.0 was released, many of us were disappointed to find we were still without the transparency abilities that our Macromedia friends were enjoying with FreeHand 8. Adobe promised transparency in 9.0, and it’s been worth the wait.

Illustrator 9.0 not only puts FreeHand’s layer effects to shame but also goes beyond what most of us would ask for. If you are familiar with the Opacity Layer settings within Photoshop then you know just how to use the ones found in Illustrator 9.0. Blending modes can all be found in the new Transparency palette. And whereas Photoshop lets you apply these features only to an entire layer, Illustrator allows even objects and groups to receive their own opacity setting and blend mode.

Sibling Rivalry
Once upon a time, Illustrator and Photoshop appeared hardly related to one another. Pasting paths from Illustrator into Photoshop and importing Photoshop documents into Illustrator was pretty much the extent of the communication between the two. These days it’s getting harder to tell these once-distant cousins apart. Now they not only share common tools, palettes, and effects, but also speak each other’s language and seem to work on the same team. For instance, Illustrator 9.0 introduces a feature called Pixel View that allows you to see what your beautiful vector artwork will look like after rasterized by Illustrator. Snap to Pixel ensures straight edges will stay crisp. All these additions are a great boon for those creating Web graphics within Illustrator, and the changes make Illustrator and Photoshop feel more like siblings.

Transforming for the Web
It seems like all Adobe products are getting upgrades for the Web, and some of these feel right at home in Illustrator. Features like the Save for Web option and the Web-Safe Color palette seem like staple features we can count on in all Adobe upgrades. But new features like Pixel Preview, Release to Layers, and support for the SVG file format ensure that Illustrator will remain much more than just a Web tool.

If you work mainly in the world of print, don’t feel put off. The new version offers up some nice features just for you. When creating a new document, you can choose RGB or CMYK color modes, and an identical color management system from Photoshop has been brought in as well. Both of these additions should reduce the chances of unexpected color results. A Simplify Path command helps reduce the amount of nodes in your more complex pieces of artwork. And a rather spiffy Overprint Preview allows you to see just how adjoining colors will trap to one another right on the screen.

Layer Management and Selection Tools
Building complex artwork within Illustrator over the years, we’ve become accustomed to using such methods as the Lock/Hide and Select Similar commands to help us select certain elements in our artwork. Although these methods have become second nature to most of us by now, you may stop from time to time to wonder if there could be a better way. Adobe has now provided us with a couple of new tools in our selection arsenal. The Selection Lasso tools give you amoebic selection ability with paths and nodes. And those of us who have found layers to be our friend will find the new sublayering feature a welcome addition. You can now easily manage your layers with hierarchical sublayers, just as you organize files with folders or subdirectories in your favorite operating system.

Keeping up Appearances
One of the most intriguing aspects of Illustrator 9.0 is the combination of the Appearance palette and Live Effects. In short, all effects are live, and their settings can be altered at any time by double-clicking them in the Appearance palette. And these aren’t your Daddy’s effects, either. Soft shadows, feathering, glows, and a bunch of Photoshop filters all make their way into the new Effects menu. Multiple effects and strokes can be applied to any object, and the underlying text or path can be edited while the applied effects update instantly.

Illustrator’s implementation of live effects is so radical and new that I expect it to take some time for users to wrap their heads around the. Perhaps an example might get our heads moving in the right direction: Starting with a line of text, I was able to convert it to outlines and then apply a free distort, a drop shadow, a Gaussian blur, and a color halftone effect. Now that the Convert to Outlines command is a live effect, I was then able to change the sentence and watch in amazement as all the effects were instantly updated to my new content.

Looking Ahead
The most exciting thing about these new Illustrator features for some users may be the likelihood that some of them will cross over into the next version of Photoshop. I’ve been praying for better layer management in Photoshop for some time now, and a layer effects feature that acts similar to the multiple, live effects in Illustrator would be incredible.

Illustrator has come a long way from its humble beginnings as an interface to PostScript and mapmaking. Whether your profession lies within illustration, print, the Web, or interactive Flash/SVG pieces, you should find Illustrator 9.0 to be a worthwhile upgrade and an invaluable tool.

  • anonymous says:

    Your review of AI 9 was informative, but it was continually compared to Freehand. Believe it or not, there still are good numbers of people who prefer CorelDRAW over either of those tools. I would be interested to see what your comparison between AI 9 and DRAW 9.

    I recently downloaded both AI and Freehand in order to evaluate them to determine if I could actually leave the world of DRAW one day. I gave myself an assignment and of course found it easier to complete in DRAW. However, I could not complete the tasks with the same functional ease in AI and Freehand, even given a learning curve. Each have their own strengths, I’ll admit.

    So, I would love to see how DRAW stacks up to AI 9. How about a showdown article?

    –David Whitmyre

  • anonymous says:

    Waiting for 9.0 to arrive….

  • anonymous says:

    I appreciate your review of Illustrators strengths and was glad to hear of Illustrator ‘s transparency capabilities including the blending modes found in Photoshop. I use Illustrator 7 on a daily basis because it is the software available in my company. But I am also quite familiar with CorelDraw and Freehand (I personally own both). CorelDraw has had transparency since ver 6. It also has more blending modes than Photoshop. My main concern is whether Illustrator has yet addressed envelope editing (which both Freehand and CorelDraw have). I feel that Illustrator’s biggest lack is no envelope editing. You have to get Kai’s vector effects in order to give Illustrator that ability, but CorelDraw will let you be much more interactive with the envelope editor. If you decide you want to change the envelope later on after you have made other changes to your document, you can go back to the envelope editor just as it was. With Kai’s vector effects, the change is permanent unless you want to

  • anonymous says:

    Well, it seems there’s quite a few new toys for us to play with in release 9 of illustrator. That’s great, cos I love illustrator, but there’s one issue I’m quite worried about. I currently use illustrator 8 all day long, both for web and for print jobs. And it’s great for the web, but the guys at my print shop frown every time I hand in a job in illustrator format. It seems illustrator files are a nightmare to output to Postscript, and it has sometimes taken them days just to figure out how to print a file. It seems that illustrator is just so non-standard in the way it prints that it makes it impossible to print straight to film. What does this mean to the print user? Well, either your print jobs are late because of problems at the print shop, or you have to save .eps’s and lay them up in Quark, which is just a pain. Plus I don’t like Quark. Wouldn’t it be nice if illustrator 9 did it all? Quite frankly I’m a bit worried that all the extra features in ver. 9 will make illustrator even less compatible with postscript handlers and make the problem even worse… Guess we’ll have to wait and see.

  • anonymous says:

    the article provides a broad yet concise overview of the new features one can find in illustrator 9.

  • anonymous says:

    I am familiar with the transparency features offered in CorelDraw and Freehand; however I think the transparency features in Illustrator 9 are definetly the most robust. If you look closely at AI 9’s capabilities I think most will probably agree.I have not seen this type of transparency support anywhwere. Looking forward…

  • anonymous says:

    I’ve grown used to FreeHand in the last year, but if this ends up as good as Mr. Penston says, I’ll have to take another look.

  • anonymous says:

    While the review is on-the-mark it sound like every other review of 9.0! In fact, the information can be found on the Adobe site. So how does the product impact our workflow and is it worth the money to update now or when the price drops. $149 to 179 seems like a small price to pay to upgrade (and it really is) but most of us are faced with upgrading several programs every quarter, and asking the boss for the upgrade money starts to turn us into “nags.” Their response is (fairly) “How much more production will the upgrade be…can we recover the upgrade cost before the next upgrade is published!”
    With that in mind-how much “faster” can we get work done using the new upgrade-no one seems to want to address that!

  • anonymous says:

    Finally a major upgrade worth the money! Being a longtime Illustrator and Freehand user (versions 3 and earlier) there’s only a couple of features that freehand has that I’d like to see in Illustrator: the paste-into command (masks are ok, but can be unwieldy and impractical) and the ability to handle multiple pages and multiple document formats. The Photoshop-like color management will be a very welcome bonus.

  • anonymous says:

    Adding transparency, better layer management and live effects will make Illustrator an even more indispensible tool, even for those of us on the edge of graphic design.

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