An Adobe family likeness
Illustrator 10.0 sports the standard Adobe interface, in which creative tools (such as the Bezier pen), object attributes (such as color), and management functions (such as layers) reside on floating palettes. Anyone who has worked with Photoshop or InDesign will immediately feel comfortable with Illustrator.
Symbols do it faster
Illustrator 10.0's new support of symbols makes it easier to create and update complex drawings. Symbols in Illustrator behave much as they do in other drawing programs, including Macromedia FreeHand: You create an object (such as a six-pronged gear), define it as a symbol, store the symbol in a palette, then place multiple instances of the symbol throughout a document. When you modify the master symbol (the one in the palette), all other instances in the drawing automatically update as well.
Unlike other drawing programs, however, Illustrator 10.0 elevates symbols from having a strictly organizational function to a creative, artistic tool. The companion Symbolism tools let you create and manipulate multiple instances of symbols simultaneously. Using specialized brushes, you can spray numerous copies of a symbol and vary its size, rotation, tint, and transparency. The Symbolism brushes provide an easy way to create randomized or natural-looking effects.
Design once, publish many times
With version 10.0, Illustrator finally integrates an important technology: data-driven graphics, which let you create templates that link back to a database. Then, using the new Variables palette, you simply designate an element in a document as a placeholder object and update or replace it from an external data source. For example, a Web designer might create a single graphic for a banner heading. Web programmers can then generate all of the different headers needed for a site simply by writing the code that links placeholder elements in the header to a text database. However, Illustrator does not offer any easy-to-use commands to link placeholders to data sources. Instead, programmers must use Visual Basic or AppleScript to create live links to an ODBC-compliant database.
Web still wanting?
Unfortunately for Web designers, there are still some gaps in Illustrator's Web arsenal. For example, Illustrator can't produce JavaScript rollovers or GIF animation. Instead, you must export your Illustrator creations to a Web graphics program such as Adobe ImageReady or Macromedia Fireworks.
Thankfully, however, this release does deliver several important new tools targeted exclusively at Web developers. Illustrator now lets you create HTML tables by slicing a drawing into sections. And because Illustrator lets you mix raster images, vector drawings, and HTML text in a single composition, your Web graphics look good and download quickly.
