What’s New In Adobe Illustrator CS5

Adobe Illustrator CS5 is packed with new and innovative features to help you produce artwork more efficiently for print, web, and digital video publication. In this chapter, you’ll learn about many of these new features—how they function and how you can use them in your work.

Perspective Drawing

Use perspective grids to draw shapes and scenes in accurate 1-, 2-, and 3-point linear perspectives. The new Perspective Grid tool allows you to turn on a grid that supports drawing directly on planes of true perspective. The new Perspective Selection tool allows objects to be moved, scaled, duplicated, and transformed dynamically in perspective. Easily move and duplicate objects from one plane to another.

Beautiful Strokes

In Illustrator CS5, a number of new features have been introduced that make designing with strokes even more powerful and flexible. The core drawing tools within Illustrator merit attention every software release, and with Illustrator CS5 there are five significant updates that new and long-time users will appreciate. You can finely control stroke width, dashes, arrowheads, and how brushes stretch along a path. And improvements in corner handling mean that stroke shapes behave predictably in tight angles or around sharp points.

Bristle Brush

Paint with vectors that resemble real-world brush strokes. The new Bristle Brush provides breakthrough control of painting. You can set bristle characteristics such as size, length, thickness, and stiffness. Set brush shape and bristle density. And set paint opacity, which uses transparency variations to simulate lifelike blending. When you have chosen the perfect characteristics for your Bristle Brush, you can save it for later use.

Multiple artboard enhancements

Work on up to 100 artboards of varying sizes all in one document, organized and viewed the way you want. New and greatly expanded artboard options in Illustrator CS5 include a full Artboards panel, in which you can name and reorder artboards. Quickly add, delete, and duplicate them using panel controls or keyboard shortcuts.

Shape Builder tool

Intuitively combine, edit, and fill shapes on your artboard. Drag the cursor across overlapping shapes and paths to create new objects and add color without accessing multiple tools and panels. Quickly unite, exclude, trim, and more.

Drawing enhancements

Work faster with everyday tools. Improvements to familiar drawing tools make using Illustrator CS5 efficient and productive. Instant masking using Draw Inside mode and joining paths with a keystroke are just two of the enhancements that speed up your routine tasks.

Round-trip editing with Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5

Use Illustrator CS5 for interaction design, now enabled by new Adobe Flash Catalyst CS5, available in Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium, Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection. Develop your ideas and design your interface in Illustrator, creating screen layouts and individual elements such as logos and button graphics. Then open your artwork in Flash Catalyst and add actions and interactive components there—without writing code.

Resolution-independent Effects

See raster effects such as drop shadows, blurs, and textures maintain a consistent appearance across media. Have you ever found that your artwork mysteriously loses its smooth, high-quality look when you publish? You can now create work for different types of output and know that popular raster effects maintain an ideal appearance no matter how your resolution settings change—from print to web to video. You can even go up to a higher resolution. Work quickly and efficiently with low-resolution artwork and then scale up when you’re ready to go to a finished output such as high-quality print.

Clean, sharp graphics for web and mobile devices

Create vector objects precisely on the file’s pixel grid for delivering pixel-aligned artwork. When you’re designing artwork for Flash Catalyst, Adobe Flash Professional software, and Adobe Dreamweaver^® software, it’s critical that raster images look sharp, especially standard web graphics at 72ppi resolution. Pixel alignment is also useful for video resolution rasterization control. And in Illustrator CS5, new web graphics tools include type enhancements. Choose one of four text anti-aliasing options for each of your Illustrator text frames.

Integration with Adobe CS Review

Illustrator CS5 integrates with Adobe CS Review, one of several new CS Live online services*. With Adobe CS Review, you can create and share online reviews for clients and colleagues down the hall or around the world. From within Illustrator CS5, publish a review of your work to the web. Multiple reviewers can then access your review from a browser without any additional software and make comments right in their browser window with easy-to-use annotation tools.

Although this list just touches on just a few of the new features of Illustrator CS5, it exemplifies Adobe’s commitment to providing the best tools possible for your publishing needs. We hope you enjoy working with Illustrator CS5 as much as we do.

—The Adobe Illustrator CS5 Classroom in a Book Team