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Deke McClelland: Adobe Illustrator is a vector-based smooth line
drawing program that's intended to suit the needs of graphic artists,
UI designers and web designers.
Let's start things off by looking at the new
and improved Illustrator CS4 interface.
I have several documents open right now, all of which are appearing
in a single window display,
at the top of which you'll see a list of titles.
Every one of these tabs with a title in it represents the name
of an open document, so that you can see all
of your open documents at a glance.
I can switch to a different open document just
by clicking on its name.
If you have so many documents open that they consume the entire width
of your screen as I do, then you can click
on this double right-pointing arrowhead and choose a title
in order to display that illustration.
Currently we're seeing a single window display.
We can change that from the new application bar,
which incidentally appears to the right of the menus under windows.
I'm going to go to this icon right here, which allows me
to arrange my documents and I'm going to choose 3-Up in order
to display three windows at a time.
Notice that both of the right-hand windows each contain a
single document.
You can change that if you like by grabbing a tab from one
of the other windows and dragging it and dropping it into place.
You can also drag a window into the middle of things like this,
in order to create a free-floating window if you like.
And then move it back into a different location in order
to fix it to the interface.
If you want to restore all of documents into a single window,
go back up to this icon and choose Consolidate All.
As in previous versions of Illustrator,
you can also customize the panels.
I'm going to go ahead and expand the panels and I'm going
to collapse a few of these groups right here by clicking
to the right of the panel titles.
Now I don't have a lot of room on this screen, so I want to make
as much room as possible for the Appearance and Layers panels.
I'd also like to bring up a couple of other panels here.
So I'll just go ahead and choose them from the list
and then I'll move them over by dragging from the top of the panel
like so -- this is a little different than it was
in Illustrator CS3 -- dragging that over and dropping it into place.
And then I'll go ahead and collapse these panels as well
down to a single icons and I might bring up a few other panels
as well just to finish things off.
Then I'll go ahead and save out my workspace.
Saving workspaces has just gotten more convenient than ever before.
You just go up here to this word Essentials.
That's what it just looks like by default.
Choose Save Workspace, go ahead and give it a name,
and then you're done and you can come back
to this workspace any time you like.
A quick note for those of you who are Macintosh users.
You'll notice that the entire Illustrator interface fits inside
something called an application frame, which ensures
that Illustrator covers up all of the applications
that are running in the background.
If you don't want that, if you want to be able to see
through Illustrator to other applications, as in the old days,
you can turn the application frame off like so, and you are going
to end up with the series of cascading independent windows.
You can consolidate all of those windows into a single tabbed window
if you like by going up to the Window menu
and choosing Arrange then Consolidate All Windows.
So this way, you end up with kind of the best of both worlds.
I'm going to go ahead and fit this window into the area
between the toolbox and the panels by clicking on the Maximize button.
And I can resize this window as I like and still gain access
to the Finder and other applications in the background.
In order to reinstate the application frame,
just go up to the Application Frame command.
Notice you can also hide and display the application bar,
which is this area right here.
Once again, all of that works strictly on the Mac.
Arguably the biggest new feature
in Illustrator CS4 is multiple artboards, which allow you
to combine multiple assets into a single document.
For example, this illustration right here contains a total
of three artboards, all of which can be printed to separate sheets
of paper or exported as a multi-page PDF document.
I'm going to go ahead and switch to this third artboard right here,
the one that contains a couple of t-shirts and I'm going
to break each one of the t-shirts onto a separate artboard.
Your artboards can be any size you want them to be, incidentally.
So I'm going to switch over to this Artboard tool and I'm going
to ahead with the help of my Smart Guides,
which have been enhanced inside of Illustrator CS4,
I'm going to scale this artboard to make it smaller,
so that it suits this single t-shirt at top.
Notice now I have a horizontal artboard combined
with a vertical artboard next door, which is perfectly acceptable.
Now I'm going to Option-drag or Alt-drag on the PC in order
to duplicate that artboard and surround the second t-shirt.
So I now have a four-artboard document.
I will press the Escape key to switch back
to the standard editing mode and then I can go up to the File menu
and choose the Save As command.
And I can save this multipage document to an Illustrator CS4 file
or I can save a multipage PDF,
each page of which respects the independently sized artboards.
I'll go ahead and cancel out of there for now.
Illustrator CS4 also offers a much improved Gradient tool.
Notice these waves in the background behind this dragon.
They're all instances of a symbol here inside of the Symbols panel.
I'm going modify that symbol by double-clicking on any one
of the instances in order to enter the symbol isolation mode,
which has been enhanced, incidentally, in Illustrator CS4.
I'm going to select this background wave and I'm going
to grab my Gradient tool.
Notice as soon as I do, I can see this bar
that represents the trajectory of my gradient.
I'm going to rotate it like so, into a different position
so the gradient progresses at a different angle,
and I can also move my gradient inside of the shape on the fly.
But here is the best news.
I can change the colors that are associated with the gradient.
I'm going to go ahead and assign red to the end of this gradient
and to the beginning of the gradient,
I'm going to assign a vivid yellow in order
to create this flame pattern right here.
When I'm done, all I have to do to update all
of my symbols is press the Escape key in order
to leave the symbol isolation mode, and now notice how quickly
and easily I was able to invoke that modification,
thanks to the improved Gradient tool.
We also have an enhance Appearance palette, which allows us
to change fills, stroke and dynamic effects from a single location.
I'm going to go ahead and select the objects
on this Flame Vent layer right here.
Notice that I can change all of the gradients for each one
of these objects using the Gradient tool, but I'm going to switch back
to the standard Selection tool for a moment.
See the Appearance palette, right here?
Let's go ahead and collapse symbols,
so that we have a little more room.
Notice it's telling me that for the most part we have mixed
appearances, because we have a variety
of different fills going on.
But none of the objects has a stroke.
I'm going to go ahead and assign a stroke to these shapes just
by clicking here inside of this swatch, and then click again
to bring up the Swatches panel.
And I'll assign this swatch right here, and I'll go ahead
and reduce the Stroke weight to 0.5 point.
So I don't have to bring up Stroke panel
or the Color panel or the Swatches panel.
They're all available to me
as subpanels here inside the Appearance panel.
Now I will expand the Stroke and I can see
that I have an Opacity setting as well.
If I click there, I bring up the Transparency panel and I can switch
to the Color Dodge mode.
So no more digging through panels.
It's all right there inside of the Appearance panel.
Quite convenient.
The final thing I want to show you is how easily you can
recolor artwork.
I'm going to go ahead and select the contents
of this Evil Worm layer right there and let's say I want
to recolor those objects using one of my color groups right here.
Specifically, I think I'm going to use Neutral Blue.
In order to do this, I'll go ahead and click on Recolor Artwork inside
of the Control panel and notice that I can see each one
of my color groups here in this list, and I can switch
to any color group I like and preview the effects
of that color group on my artwork in the document window.
As I say, I'll try Neutral Blue and I can just drag these items now.
I can drag these colors inside of this list in order to switch them
to different locations, or I can drag the colors up
and down the right side here
of the current colors list inside of the Assign mode.
Once I have finished, I click OK and the job is done.
Illustrator CS4 is about getting better work done more quickly.
This is a program that places high value on your time.