Real World Computing
Creative illustration
The strength of Illustrator's vector-only approach is that results remain fully scalable and resolution-independent, even when exported as EPS or PDF and output via a DTP application. You can use the same logo artwork to produce inkjet A4 fliers or a billboard-sized advert, and the results will be as sharp as the output medium allows. No wonder vector-handling tricks such as blending, expanding and pattern handling remain the stock-in-trade of advanced Illustrator users. However, such lateral thinking doesn't come easily to beginners.
More importantly, such tricks forfeit most of the other great advantage of vector drawing: control and editability. Break down a stroke into a shape, for example, and you can no longer easily tweak the path it follows, and changing the shapes used in a Pathfinder-based transparency effect requires recreating the effect from scratch. So even with Illustrator 7, trying to achieve creative effects still left almost all the hard work to the user and, although the results were richer, they still weren't that great. You can labour to produce a logo with a bit of hand-drawn flair and a transparency effect, but look at a photo-realistic illustration produced in Xara or an "oil painting" produced with Expression and you'll understand how far Illustrator 7 had fallen behind. Adobe eventually realised how out of touch Illustrator had become and with two extraordinary releases reinvented its drawing flagship.
The great leap forward
The great challenge lay in grafting on new creative power without throwing the vector baby out with the bathwater. The first sign of Illustrator's new creative depth was version 8's live handling of vector-based blends, which let you update just end colours and path while Illustrator automatically updated the blend to fit. Rival packages had long offered a similar ability, but Illustrator 8 broke new ground with its gradient meshes.
The obvious limitation of blends is that they're based on just two end colours and shapes, but the new Gradient Mesh tool lets you click anywhere in a shape to define points to which new arbitrary colours can be applied. While not exactly intuitive, this feature does enable far more advanced fills, enabling subtle colour shifts and shading to produce, say, realistic apples or flower petals. Illustrator itself (thanks to PostScript 3, which introduced dedicated Smooth Shading capabilities) now does all the hard work behind the scenes, breaking the gradient into the necessary sequence of coloured shapes, based on the final print output settings to minimise visible banding, so the gradient mesh remains scalable, resolution-independent and editable within Illustrator.
Illustrator 8 didn't merely improve the formatting of filled shapes, but totally transformed open-path formatting with its new Brushes palette. The program offers four main brush types: Calligraphic, the nib of which can be angled to produce flowing strokes; Scatter, the "bristles" of which dot randomly around the stroke; Pattern, which uses four "pattern blocks" to create regular borders; and Art, which stretches a single pattern along the length of an arbitrary path. The latter are particularly effective, ensuring pin-sharp scalability while keeping the connection between shape and path so you can edit Path, Color and Brush settings later. The Expand command is no longer needed unless you require absolute node-based control. The results and level of control aren't quite equal to Expression's, but brushes add a whole new creative dimension to Illustrator.
