Adobe Illustrator CS5 is the newest in the Adobe Illustrator line. The previous version offered many great features but what does the CS5 bring to the table? Let’s take a look at some of the new features in Adobe’s graphic and illustration program.
The one thing that stands out right from the get-go is the multiple artboards feature. This new features allows you to grab any existing artboards and combine it in one document. You can edit them any way you want just like you can do as layers. Up to 100 artboards can be used on one document and you can add, edit, delete, and resize them as well. This is an expansion of the feature that was in Adobe Illustrator CS4.
Another new feature is the Shape Builder tool. You can use this tool to really edit your images without relative ease. You’ll be able to overlap shapes, get rid of parts that you don’t need, combine different shapes, and fill out any areas very easily. This feature is very helpful if you’re trying to design logos and advertising campaign.
The third new feature is the drawing enhancements that have been made. This feature allows you to draw inside a shape or image. If any of your drawing makes it outside, it will be automatically set so that any drawing outside of the shape will be removed. This allows you to spend less time editing your work and will help you create artwork faster.
The fourth new feature is the exciting bristle brush painting. With the bristle brush selected, you can choose from different shapes and sizes. This looks like you’ve just hand painted something with a real wet brush. It creates a really unique look to your work and you can imagine all the different designs you can create with the new brush.
The fifth new feature is the perspective drawing tools. To start, you can manipulate the grid and choose the vanishing points. Once you have everything set the way you want it, you can start using artwork and set it at different points of the grid. The really unique thing about this feature is that you can put a graphic on the grid and the perspective of the original image will change according to a distance.
For example, if you have a posted on a building grid, it would look much different if it was in the outer edges than closer to the inner edges of the wall. What the perspective features does is change the view of the image according to the distance so that you don’t have to create the original image in relation to the perspective.
So those are the 5 new features in Adobe Illustrator CS5. There are many more new features that have been added but it’s a huge list to go over. The 5 features in this article are what stand out the most in the CS5. The CS5 is bound to amaze designers with all the new tools available to them.
Learn more about the new features in one of our hands-on Adobe Illustrator classes.
