March 2009 Archives

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Product Marketing Manager

Since there's been a lot of discussion here on multiple artboards in Illustrator CS4, I want to round out that focus with links to resources for customers who are just becoming familiar with this new feature or customers who have downloaded the free 30-day trial and are looking to experiment.

First, if you're using an older version of Illustrator and would like to experience multiple artboards in Illustrator CS4, you can download the Illustrator CS4 free trial here.

AdobeTV has a number of free video tutorials on multiple artboards in Illustrator CS4:

Some other great tutorials:

Posted by: Neeraj Nandkeolyar, Workflow specialist, Illustrator team

Typically, when we start work on a new release, a list of features is put forward and each item is weighed against others on the list. 'Multiple Artboards' was one of the oldest entries on the list. All the forces never joined hands so it could make it into the product. In CS4, too, we had put 'the list' upfront and started seeking commitments from stakeholders - and gradually built consensus. One after another we started hearing an 'aye" for Multiple Artboards in CS4. Product Management, Development, Quality Engineering, Experience Design, et al. There was enthusiasm, and this 'old' item on the list suddenly became exciting. The ‘Multiple Artboards Feature Team’ was born.

The multiple artboards feature interacted with a lot of other features in Illustrator. It was like going up a mountain trail with lots of different teams, each working on its feature and impacting multiple artboards when the trails intersected. Each of these features had its own needs from mulitple artboards. Illustrator's capable pre-release users helped us prioritize these multiple asks. They guided and helped the team correct some approaches as well.

For example: the feature team decided to reduce the canvas size to 14400 x 14400 pts from 16383 x 16383 pts owing to PDF 1.5 standards. For older files, an 'Enable Oversized Canvas' was added. There were arguments in favor and against, but our team couldn't decide. But advice from the pre-release users changed things: "Would you get more tech support calls asking what is ' Enable Oversized Canvas' or more calls for not saving the big artboard to PDF 1.5"? The team decided to go back to the traditional canvas size.

Time passed by, features were shaping up nicely, and there were good feelings all around - it was time for Uncle Murphy's visit. Just after all features were marked ‘done,' the QE team broke free from the trail and started wandering around. They started testing multiple artboards with older Ai versions - and a plethora of issues started cropping up. At one point it almost shook our confidence and we thought of reducing the scope of the feature.

Both Development and QE started ‘combing’ through the features. Product Management assessed risks with each issue, Engineering worked towards finding a solution to issues, getting approvals and then making code changes after multiple reviews. QE verified those changes, and made further aggressive attempts to find more issues. Multiple SWAT teams were formed to track changes. With a combined and dedicated effort, and keeping aside the luxuries of life (at times necessities, too), we got back to the state where the trails became smooth and the teams regained their confidence. That bunch of people who had started together and taken different trails, finally joined back on the other of the mountain - happy and confident.

Working late nights and weekends, surviving on pizza and caffeine, having group discussions, and making quick strategies and plans... all added to the 'adventure' of developing multiple artboards. It was fun.

- Neeraj

Did you like this post? Would you like to hear more from about the feature development process? Let us know.

Contributed by Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Team Rowing Captain

Last Friday Terry talked about some of the exciting new libraries and How To’s that we shipped with Illustrator CS4. I wanted to take time today to focus on some additional new CS4 Sample Art Files that show how Illustrator can be used to create visually intriguing, creative flow charts. Yes, you heard me right, I did say “Visually Intriguing” and “Flow Charts” in the same sentence!

Jennifer Willis is one of those rare designers who doesn’t cringe when taking on information graphics. Instead she has found a way of infusing her creative style into flow charts, while obviously having a great time doing it. Jennifer uses a variety of symbols and arrowheads that she creates. This adds a personal touch that reflects not only the designer but the client as well.

Contributed by David Macy, Illustrator Senior Product Manager

Great lead-in yesterday about the productivity enhancements found by using Multiple Artboards in Illustrator CS4.

So, why do we call these Artboards in Illustrator and not Pages? The word “page” is well understood in our language, and has implications based on its true meaning and on how it has been expressed in existing software applications. In printed materials, pages have a fixed sequence, and are typically read in the sequence they are presented. In electronic formats such as web sites, pages may be viewed in any sequence, but are still generally presented based on a hierarchy – usually with a “Main” or “Home” page that everything cascades from. In fact, when you are laying out a magazine or building a website, you will usually begin with a specification defining the structure of the final site or document. This kind of “structured workflow” is supported very well by Adobe’s main tool for document layout – InDesign, and Adobe’s main tool for website layout – Dreamweaver.

When we took a close look at what Illustrator users needed we saw that in most cases it was not the ability to create multiple page documents, and in fact it was very often based on an un-structured workflow with no particular sequence or hierarchy. Of course there are many very valid use cases for creating sequenced documents from Illustrator, but there are also a lot of compelling use cases where artboards are simply a collection of related assets with no particular sequence or hierarchy. Given the desire of many artists to work in Illustrator in a very fluid and creative way, unbound by a structured workflow, we decided to make an extremely flexible system for creating and managing artboards. In Illustrator, you can make artboards of any size and in any position on Illustrator’s canvas, all depending on what you are trying to do with them-

Illustrator does continue to grow and evolve, so please let us know how you use Multiple Artboards in CS4 or how you would like to see them change over time.

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Product Marketing Manager

Adobe just announced new benchmarking results from an independent research study conducted by Pfeiffer Consulting. The benchmarking covers design, digital imaging, interactive design, web, and video activities with Creative Suite 4 software.

It was great to see the new Illustrator CS4 multiple artboards featured prominently in the research and timesavings results. The Illustrator product team really worked hard to incorporate this most-requested capability into the latest release of Illustrator.

About time you say? Yes, but it still doesn't take away from the credit due the Illustrator product team for their hard work. Hopefully, we'll hear from the team on the challenges they faced building this feature.

For more on the study, check out the info on Adobe.com

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Marketing Manager

The Align tools in Illustrator are core tools for most every customer, and while using these tools is straightforward, there is functionality there that's not so obvious.

For example, have you every wanted to make everything align around a single object or group?

It's simple, but I didn’t know this trick when I joined the Illustrator team, and I’ve worked with Illustrator for years. Being shown how to do this this was one of those “ah-ha!” moments, so I want to pass the hint along.

By default, Illustrator uses the Bounding Box of your selected objects when aligning objects. In the screenshot below, you'll see the outline of the Bounding Box of the four selected objects.

Selecting Horizontal Align Left from the align controls in the Control panel or the Align panel aligns all the objects to the left edge of the Bounding Box, as shown below.

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Marketing Manager

Logrolling in Our Time

• John Nack points to a new tutorial where Matt Kloskowski suggests customers raid Illustrator's library for art to use in Photoshop. I just want to give a shout out to the great team over at GoMedia who created this fresh content for Illustrator CS4.
• And while we're on Illustrator CS4 content, check out the amazing sample art and How-to Guides tucked into the Illustrator CS4 Cool Extras folder. Don't have CS4? You can still view and download them for free on Adobe.com
• More content props: Illustrator CS4 has new symbol libraries as well. Nick La at N.Design Studio was tapped to help develop that great content for us. His free wallpapers are stunning, and he shares his creative process on his blog as well.

All of these designers contribute their content and tutorials to the community for free via their blogs and websites, so check 'em out.

• And finally, vectortuts+, another great community resource, has an interview with Jelle Gijsberts from the Netherlands, whose beautiful illustrations are both playful and compelling. Check out the interview for his tip on using the new Blob Brush tool in Illustrator CS4.

In NYC? Head down to Webster Hall tonight for the Cut&Paste Digital Design Tournament, where top designers will rock the stage at this venerable venue whose walls have seen everything from Emma Goldman to drag queens on acid. To quote Jerri Blank, "Good times!"

Contributed by Ian Giblin, Illustrator Torch Bearer

In Terry's post yesterday he hinted at some of the hidden potential of Live Color. Naturally, creative tasks spring to mind when people hear of the feature's basic concept, but since the feature can find and display all the colors in your art, it is extremely useful for many production tasks. Let's run through a common example problem and how to use Live Color to solve it.

As you know, there can be many ways to create a color that looks black. Some, like rich black (a), below, may be deliberately used to create a darker tone in the printing process or to avoid trapping issues for type. Others, like (b), may be accidentally introduced when a black object from an RGB document is pasted into a CMYK document.

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Product Marketing Manager

Live Color, first introduced in Illustrator CS3, is one of my favorite features, but it seems that almost no one knows it's there or, if they do discover it, they can't figure out how to use it. Some think it's only for selecting color harmonies, and hey, they're designers, they don't need software to choose colors for them, right?

For sure, there are many opinions on the implementation and user interface for Live Color, and I'll admit, I'm hardly the expert on how to use this complex set of tools for choosing, applying and controlling color. I use Live Color simply because I can work with colors globally and adjust them in a design "live," letting me quickly fine tune colors visually.

Can I at least tease you enough to explore this feature? Hang with me, and I'll also point you to great tutorials from those who can really show you how to make it work.

From Brenda Sutherland, a CS3 tutorial on Recolor Artwork

Note, the CS3 Video Workshop, where the video above is found, has lots of great content for all the Creative Suite products, but it seems to have disappeared from Adobe.com. Hopefully, the Adobe TV team is moving these videos over to a new home there. But in the meantime, you can explore this resource here.

Here's Deke McClelland with another take on Live Color, for CS4. Note, Deke mentions the Kuler panel in Illustrator CS4. Illustrator CS3 users can also access the Kuler panel from the Illustrator Main Menu>Adobe Labs>kuler. It was a Beta preview for CS3, and not marketed, so it was bit hidden. And only available in English.

Hopefully, this will be enough to convince you to give Live Color a spin. Let me know if you'd like to know more about Live Color, and I'll get the folks who actually helped create these tools to weigh in here on your thoughts and opinions.

Contributed by Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Drum Major

You might think that those of us who work on Illustrator see so many uses of the application that we’re not all that easily impressed. I have to tell you, the opposite is true. It seems whenever we meet a new Illustrator user we discover yet another creative use for a tool or another interesting way to solve a problem. Sometimes we are simply gobsmacked by what someone is doing with the app, pushing it beyond the boundary of what seams reasonable into the land of the unbelievable.

When this video floated into our inboxes, it captivated all of us. I think you’ll find yourself just as fascinated by Chad Pugh’s time lapsed coverage (over several months of work, condensed to six and half minutes) of his amazing illustration “Science Machine.”

Science Machine from Chad Pugh on Vimeo.

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Product Marketing Manager

I always like to get good news about all of our customers, but especially those "FOIs" (Friends of Illustrator) who use vector graphics to help craft their unique styles.

Catalina Estrada, Simone Legno and Chevon Hicks are amazing designers who have been working on some interesting projects. Check em' out after the jump...

Contributed by Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Drum Major

Wouldn’t it be handy if you could keep a shoebox for every client you had. You could fill it with the colors, fonts and logos that you keep around just for that client, and every time you had a new job for them, you could just open that shoebox and shake the content out onto your computer and PRESTO, begin work with everything at your fingertips!

What if I told you this wasn’t pure fantasy, that you can assemble that shoebox, and many more like them, so they’re always ready for you whenever you need to pull them off the shelf? There is a way, and it’s so simple you won’t believe anything this easy could be so powerful and save you so much time.

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Product Marketing Manager

Creating portraits using vector graphics can be problematic; there's just so much work out there that shows great technique but very little in terms of creativity.

Tasso is a young artist from Southern California who's work always manages to capture the moment.
Check out this video of him creating a self-portrait with Illustrator. Music is Bluebird from One Self.

For more on Tasso, check out his MySpace page and an interview with him on vectorvault.com

Contributed by David Macy, Illustrator Product Manager

When I meet people who rely on Adobe Illustrator for their daily work, I like to ask them how long they have been using it. Some respond with the number of years, but most respond by the version number they started with, or sometimes even with the key feature they remember from that version. One man at a San Francisco user group meeting smiled and proudly said “I’ve been using Illustrator since the time when you had to enter text in a dialog box!”.

Imagine that – in the first versions of Illustrator you actually had to type your text in a modal dialog, then click OK before you could see the text on the artboard. Moving from that to being able to enter text directly where you want it and get a real-time WYSIWYG preview on the art as you type was such an amazing improvement in usability, efficiency and creativity that direct on-the-artboard control should have become one of the guiding principles for the design of every new feature in Illustrator.

Now, I’m not saying that each and every control in Illustrator should sit right on top of your artwork. There is certainly a time and place for tools and settings which are accessed from those elegant, dock-able, floating panels that we’ve developed. What I am saying is that there are many features of Illustrator that can be improved by imaging how to give artists more direct interaction with the artwork. Direct control on the artwork is what we had in mind as we re-imagined some of the important features in CS4 (Gradients and Smart Guides for example), and you will certainly see more features that are re-imagined to follow this guiding principle in the future. What Illustrator features can you think of that would benefit from this philosophy?

And for extra credit – can you name the Illustrator version where live text on the artboard was introduced?

Contributed by Terry Hemphill, Illustrator Product Marketing Manager

Rounded rectangles in Illustrator -- we all use them, but how many of us create them using Effects?

Instead of using the Rounded Rectangle Tool, create a standard rectangle and apply the Effect>Convert to Shape>Rounded Rectangle. Using Effects lets you can make adjustments to the roundness of the corners at anytime, all while previewing the changes.

Here's a link to a great tutorial from CreativePro.com written by Mordy Golding.