Adobe Illustrator CS5 review

Adobe Illustrator occupies a slightly odd position in its market. On the Mac, it’s the de facto choice for vector illustration, used for everything from logos to fine art. PC users have other options, though, including CorelDRAW and Xara Xtreme.

To stay ahead at the high end, Illustrator added a number of unique features in CS3 and a new interface in CS4. In CS5 the changes are practical rather than structural: Adobe has made certain tasks easier and provided more tweaks to make things look precisely as you want.

The innovation that may see the most everyday use is variable width strokes. Drawing lines that vary along their length is one of the abilities that makes modern vector programs more than just technical drawing tools. Previously, there were various ways to do this, including drawing with the stylus of a pressure-sensitive graphics tablet and applying various predefined contours, but getting the effect just right could take considerable trial and error. In CS5, you can add width handles at any point along a path to adjust its exact breadth at that point, and most brushes and effects applied to it will scale to match.

On the same theme of putting you in control of your drawing, complex strokes such as dashes, arrowheads and brushes have extra settings. For example, art brushes allow you to stretch and repeat elements along a path. The results can look awkward at sharp corners, but you can now make simple tweaks to fix this.

Since vector graphics are scalable without loss of quality, they’re a good choice for elements such as buttons and banners that will be repurposed for various jobs and screen sizes. But scaling isn’t always simple; for example, you might need to stretch a button to twice the width while leaving its text label intact. A system known as nine-slice scaling facilitates this in Illustrator CS5, letting you set up elements that scale exactly as you want.

Bristle Brushes create more realistic ‘painted’ strokes – nothing like the wet media in Corel Painter, for example, but interesting for a vector-based environment – and the Draw Inside option lets you ‘colour in’ shapes rather than applying a mask afterwards.

Traditional perspective drawing is sometimes neglected now that 3D software allows objects to be designed in 3D space, but that’s often an unsatisfactory approach for graphic artists.

Illustrator’s new perspective grids make drawing in 1, 2 or 3-point perspective almost foolproof, allowing items to be positioned and scaled within perspective planes. By adjusting the grid to match a placed photo, you can place new graphics into an existing scene, for example adding logos to buildings or packages. This is in some ways similar to the Vanishing Point feature in Photoshop, but potentially more powerful.

Although cheaper rivals may offer more instant effects, it’s increasingly hard to fault Illustrator’s breadth and depth of features, and integration with the other Creative Suite apps is a significant bonus for many. For example, Flash Catalyst, new in CS5, makes it simple to turn user interface elements designed in Illustrator into an interactive Flash app without programming skills.

Despite a fairly steep learning curve, Illustrator remains the most professional of drawing programs, offering stability, depth and print production credibility that others can’t match. For its target audience, this is an upgrade well worth paying worth.