Tom Arah shows you how to uncover Adobe Illustrator’s creative depths.

Ten years ago today’s market-defining vector drawing package, Adobe Illustrator, was an underpowered embarrassment. Compared to pioneering rivals such as Xara and Expression (see previous article), Adobe’s flagship just wasn’t able to produce work with the same creative depth...

In short, despite its name, it wasn’t much good at illustration. That largely remains the view today, as vector artwork generally and Illustrator’s in particular, is seen as clinical, flat and lifeless: too clearly computer-generated. However, nowadays that perception is completely unfair. Work at it - and more importantly work with it - and these days Illustrator CS3 (free trial from adobe.com/downloads) can claim to be the most creatively exciting application on the planet – especially with a little help along the way (see Creative Xtras boxout)
First it’s necessary to understand why Illustrator’s default position is over-clinical, flat and lifeless. Draw a simple circle, scale it up massively and then zoom in on its edge and even at Illustrator CS3’s maximum 6400% magnification, the boundary looks pin sharp. That’s because the circle is described as a mathematical vector rather than as a fixed size bitmap grid of coloured pixels. Because Illustrator’s graphics are described programmatically as filled shapes and stroked paths via Adobe’s PostScript page description language, the same graphic program can be output at maximum quality at any size. This mathematical precision is precisely what Illustrator gave the world of PC graphics: pin-sharp resolution-independence.

By default Illustrator’s vector handling seems best-suited for flat technical illustration

The problem is that while crisp edges and solid fills are perfect for defining scalable typefaces for high-resolution imageset output, which is what PostScript was originally devised for, they are hardly ideal for creative graphics. For creative illustration, whether realistic or artistic, you really need rich fill and stroke formatting preferably leading on to integrated bitmap handling. But that wasn’t the view at Adobe. Illustrator’s great strength was its vector underpinning and so nothing must compromise Illustrator’s PostScript-only EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) output.