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Design Integration

For designers who have had to struggle going from Illustrator to another Adobe product, Adobe has finally created what they call a "comprehensive creative ecosystem" for design integration. Illustrator 10, Photoshop 6.0, InDesign, GoLive, LiveMotion, and AfterCast now share color management, Smart Object technology and many different tools. Illustrator 10 now incorporates the manual slicing tools and the Magic Wand found in Photoshop/Image-Ready. Additionally the sharing of files between the two products has been vastly improved.

Illustrator 10 files can be brought into InDesign 2.0 and modified with the Adobe-standard Pen tool. Effects such as transparency and drop shadows can now be shared between both programs.

If you use Adobe GoLive to create Web sites, Illustrator files are now able to become Smart Objects in GoLive. Layers created in Illustrator can now be preserved when those Illustrator files are imported into LiveMotion. In addition Illustrator slices can now be imported into GoLive in the same manner that GoLive supports slices created in Photoshop/Image Ready. Exporting Illustrator files as Shockwave Flash (SWF) and Encapsulated PostScrip (EPS) allows those files to be animated in LiveMotion.

Illustrator 10's new data driven graphics feature, which allows seamless integration with both GoLive's Dynamic Link and Adobe's AlterCast, is ideal for creating Illustrator templates.

Slicing in Illustrator 10

For those who already are slicing in Photoshop or ImageReady the procedure in Illustrator 10 will be easy. Yet because Illustrator 10 has now been optimized to produce Web-friendly objects, this program takes automatic slicing one step farther than other current Adobe products. In Illustrator 10 automatic slicing is object-based. You can scale the objects after you slice them, you can rearrange the objects after they have been sliced and all these actions can be performed on individual objects as well as groups of objects. In slicing1 you see how Illustrator has sliced the graphic automatically when the top illustration was selected.

After the objects have been sliced, you can select several objects and make a group. If the groups are re-arranged, the slices will remain with the original objects, making changes in graphic design easy -- see slicing2.

slicing1	slicing2

Additionally different slices can be saved in different formats. For example if you have a block of text in your file it can be saved in html format rather than as a graphic, however this only appears to work if the background is white.

Warping

For those seasoned Illustrator users this new version has incorporated quicker and better ways to manipulate text and graphics that are awesome. The new warp effect includes not only 15 ways to warp your design (and your mind), but within each warp effect you can change from horizontal to vertical styles with bend percentages from -100 to +100 with both horizontal and vertical distortion.

To demonstrate some of the warping available I warped a leaf in several ways and warped text in other ways.

Illustrations of differing warping techniques.

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