Real World Computing
Creative illustration
An even bigger transformation arrived with Illustrator 9's Transparency palette, which lets you quickly apply an opacity level or blend mode to an object, group or layer. Just try overlaying some circles filled with that polka-dot pattern and then setting blend modes to Exclusion or Difference. Better still, Illustrator 9 lets you apply those graduated transparency and blend effects that are crucial in reproducing the subtle glass and shadow effects necessary for truly realistic illustration, by using gradients or gradient meshes as opacity masks for an object. Its transparency handling is nowhere near as direct or as fast as Xara's, but the level of control is stronger. And Xara's super-fast transparency handling is only made possible by converting its vector objects to bitmaps, whereas Illustrator manages to keep everything vector-based for as long as possible, only "flattening" the artwork for output. The downside is that Illustrator pays a price in processing time at output. Generally, though, it's a brilliantly effective system that allows the user to work at a more creative level of abstraction while Illustrator does the hard work behind the scenes.
Vector-friendly transparency and blend modes were such watershed events that they tended to overshadow Illustrator 9's other creative advances, which were in many ways even more significant. The first of these was converting Illustrator's various transformation, distortion, offset, warp and pathfinder filters into new, non-destructive effects. For example, draw a circle and you can apply the Roughen effect with a small size setting that gives it a more lop-sided and less perfect effect, while a large setting turns it into a jagged sunburst. You can still edit the underlying circle shape - say, to squash it into an ellipse - independently of the Roughen effect and you can retrospectively change the roughen size.
Applying vector effects non-destructively was a great leap forward, especially when combined with the 3D and artistic Scribble effects added later, but Illustrator 9's innovations didn't stop there. Adobe at last added dedicated, non-destructive bitmap-based effects, starting with the majority of Photoshop's Artistic, Blur and Sharpen filters. Better still, it introduced dedicated Feather and Drop Shadow effects that are true bitmapped effects - complete with soft semi-transparency - and look infinitely more real than their vector-only equivalents. Illustrator can finally produce artwork with bitmapped soft edges as well as vectorised hard edges.
You need some way to manage these new non-destructive vector and bitmap effects, and that's done via the Appearance palette, which lists all the effects applied to the current object. Simply drag them around the list to reorder them, click on the trashcan to remove them, or double-click to call up their filter dialog and retrospectively change its settings. Transparency, blend modes and the current fill and stroke are shown as well as effects, a hugely powerful feature that lets you apply different settings to the fill and the stroke.
The Appearance palette also enables another of Illustrator 9's innovations: hidden away in its submenu are commands for adding new fills and strokes. By default, any additions simply overlay and hide those below them, so there might seem little point, but by applying different effects, opacities and blend modes you can quickly build up some extraordinarily rich formatting. Draw another circle and apply one of the two default colour gradient fills that Illustrator supplies on the Swatches palette, then one of the two Art brushes from the Brushes palette, then use the Appearance palette to add a new fill and a new stroke. Now you're ready for a bit of creative exploration: select the top fill and set its blend mode to Color Burn in the Transparency panel, then apply each of Illustrator's pattern and gradient fills from the Swatches palette in turn. Now select the top stroke and apply an offset path or Roughen effect and then apply the other default Art, Calligraphic and Scatter brush styles.
