Adobe Illustrator 10 introduces new tools, new techniques, and certainly has come a long way since the first Illustrator hit the market place. Adobe is noted for its sophisticated and complex software products with Illustrator being the flagship product. Illustrator 10 takes the industry standard for vector graphics software to a new level. This review will cover most of the new features found in Illustrator 10 rather than review the entire range of possibilities under Illustrator 10.

Illustrator 10, like its counterpart Adobe Photoshop 6, has now become a product for creating and optimizing vector or raster-based graphics for the Web.  It now includes Symbols--objects that can be reused and multiplied, options for slicing images to reduce their size, support for Macromedia Flash Shockwave Flash (SWF) and Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) formats, as well as supporting dynamic data driven graphics.

Symbols

Illustrator has new support for symbols, keeping file sizes small while allowing the user to add, multiply or change every instance of a symbol quickly, consistently, and easily.  The new symbolism tool has eight different options to manipulate the symbols.

You can set options for symbolism tools by double clicking the symbolism tool in the toolbox.

Each symbols tool has a specific option palette, the one pictured above is for the symbol sprayer. Additionally another fly-out menu is included on the symbols palette.

Symbols can be created from any Illustrator design. For example I created a logo using text that I turned into a symbol so that it could be reused over and over.

The new symbols have great potential for creative use. It will save Illustrator users a great deal of time. However, saving symbols for reuse with files other than the file in which the symbol was created is cumbersome. There should be a command for saving libraries that can be readily accessed when using symbols. Symbols should be easy to save and retrieve especially when designing web pages, multi-paged documents, or collaborating with others.

Illustrator 10 includes enhancements for combining shapes. As shapes are the building blocks of compound objects Illustrator 10 has made the job of creating and combining these elements easier. Illustrator now includes an updated Pathfinder palette with different compound shape options.

The tools from left to right are: Shape mode: Add, subract, intersect, exclude; Pathfinders: divide, trim, merge, crop, outline, minus back.

The Pathfinder options menu allows for finer precision in selecting and combining shapes.

Using two simple shapes with the red star in the back and a green rounded rectangle in front, all the pathfinder options are illustrated.