Category: Software → Adobe Illustrator CS4

I have been working with the new Illustrator CS4 everyday for the past week. To test out the functionality and new features of CS4, I worked on logos, illustrations, web designs and more. There are some great improvements in the CS4 version of Illustrator. What are the new functions? How do they work? Is it worth it to upgrade? I’ll answer these questions in my review of Illustrator CS4!

In the review that follows I highlight some of the new and most prominent features of Illustrator CS4. It is broken down into Workspace Tools, New Drawing and Coloring Tools, Improved Core Functionality, and Enhanced Integration at Export (these are the new feature listed on Illustrator CS4 help site, accessed through the New Feature link on Illustrator CS4’s Welcome Screen). After the short description of the new features in each category, I give you my take on it. Further down the review you can also see my concerns, performance review and if you should upgrade.

Below is a breakdown of the system that I installed Illustrator CS4 on. Also, the type of work that I have been creating when reviewing it.

* I reviewed Illustrator CS4 on a 3.06 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo iMac with 4 GB of ram running Mac OS 10.5.5.
* The past week I have created logos, illustrations, and web design elements with Illustrator CS4. The files sizes have ranged from 196 kb to 120 mb

New Workspace Features
Multiple Artboards

Replacing the Crop Area tool, multiple artboards can create documents that contain up to 100 artboards of varying sizes. The artboards can overlap, appear side-by-side, and even stack on top of one another. You can also print, save, and export these artboards independently or together.

I have to say that I rarely used the Crop tool. So I am happy with the Multiple Artboard replacement. Having multiple artboards makes it much easier to work with multiple documents compared to previous versions of Illustrator. I usually need multiple documents for a project or illustration series. Being able to have these documents on one artboard is great. It is easy to create new artboards with the Artboard tool, adjust the size and placement and quickly crop the artboards with the Control Panel.

The only problem I ran into with the multiple artboards (I just might be missing the solution), is that you can’t change the numbering on the artboards. If I wanted to make the first artboard the third one, I can’t. Granted, you can drag the artwork from one board to another, but it would be easier if I could just number them differently.