Real World Computing

Illustrator's default range of swatches and brushes is very limited, but if you start mixing them together and adding effects you can create a huge range of possible end results. In fact, there's a danger of floundering in such a vast creative territory, which is where the last of Illustrator 9's great innovations comes in: graphic styles. Once you've built an object appearance you like, simply drag the object onto the Graphic Styles palette and all its fill, stroke, effect, opacity and blend mode settings are recorded for reuse. To instantly and consistently apply the same rich format, simply open the library containing that graphic style and drag it onto the target object.

Graphic styles enable you to instantly tap into Illustrator's extraordinary range and depth of creative formatting. Create a blank CMYK document, draw yet another circle and apply the first of the few default graphic styles Illustrator offers. Your circle springs to life, looking soft, hand-drawn, cross-hatched and multicoloured. Open the Appearance palette to see how the effect has been achieved and you might expect to see one of Illustrator's brush-based Photoshop filters there. That's one way it could have been done, but in fact the style is built from overlaid gradient fills, each with its own opacity setting and Scribble effect. Now zoom into 6,400% as we did with our first flat coloured circle and you'll see that soft, hand-drawn bitmap-style effect is composed of scores of semi-transparent overlapping lines, which Illustrator will output as hundreds of discrete vector objects, each of whose edges remain pin-sharp.

Illustrator is no longer confined to over-clinical vector drawing as it once was. In fact, Illustrator proves that, with a bit of lateral thinking and a lot of hard, behind-the-scenes work on the program's part, vector drawing can add creative richness to all its other virtues.

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