Over the years Illustrator has become almost as dominant for vector handling as Photoshop has for pixel manipulation. The program has never quite inspired the same devotion as Adobe’s flagship product, however.

With this CS4 release, Adobe is determined to make the program work on the side of its users, not against them. And it starts with the interface. New features include a Workspace switcher with more presets to choose from, tabbed documents, plus the ability to split the screen and control which layout appears in which window.

The interface is also now more proactive than in previous versions. Drag a group of items onto the Symbol panel icon, for example, and it springs open, allowing you to drop them onto the library. Smart Guides have also been made more intelligent and helpful.

Glorious isolation

The biggest change to Illustrator’s working environment is the reworking of Isolation Mode handling. This sounds intimidating, but the underlying idea is relatively straightforward. It allows you to work on isolated selections while the surrounding artwork is made inactive.

Previously, Isolation Mode was limited to symbols and groups, but now the idea has been extended to images, gradient mesh objects, clipping paths, compound paths and paths themselves. Even better, Adobe has added a breadcrumb trail to the Isolation Mode view, which is clickable so you can quickly back out to work at higher levels. Once you get used to it, this approach to drawing proves invaluable, especially for complex artwork.

Another area that has been reworked to make it more powerful and intuitive is Illustrator’s gradient handling. In CS3 this was awkward to use, and involved setting parameters and colour stops in a discrete Gradient panel. Now, all that control has been moved to the object being worked on. When defining colour stops, for example, you can now set opacity, which means it’s much easier to create graduated transparency effects.

Illustrator CS4 also sees the addition of extra drawing power in the form of Blob brushes. Illustrator CS3 laid down lines as stroke paths, but with the Blob brush you lay down a filled shape, so it’s more like painting than drawing. And, as with paint, where strokes of the same colour overlap they combine into a single object. For painting-style illustration it’s a liberating release.

Many pages make light work

The biggest sign that Adobe has been listening to its users is that Illustrator CS4 at last supports multiple pages, or “Artboards”. These aren’t typical pages as most people think of them, as they all appear onscreen simultaneously. And don’t think that Illustrator is competing directly with InDesign for producing multiple-page publications either – it lacks features such as automatic text flow.

It does improve navigation of collections of artwork, however, allowing you to quickly page through artboards with the Artboard Navigator at the bottom of the document window. And, when you print or export to PDF, each artboard can be output as its own page.

Where Illustrator’s artboards come into their own is when handling multiple variations of the same design. They make it simple, for example, to quickly rework the same advert for different column widths.

Perhaps the biggest benefit of artboards is that they help ensure that layout variations share the same overall look and feel. And Illustrator CS4’s Appearances panel helps in this regard: it has been completely reworked to make it a powerful control centre for advanced formatting.

Click on the new Stroke, Fill and Effect command icons and you can rapidly build up rich effects for your objects, setting many parameters such as stroke width and fill colour directly in the panel. You can also now hide the display of processor-intensive effects as you work. When happy with the look of your object, you can quickly save it to the Graphic Styles panel for re-use. And you can now Alt-click to overlay multiple styles on an object.

Finally, output options have been improved. Illustrator’s background is in high-end PostScript-based commercial print and here a new Separations Preview is welcome, while for screen-based output there’s support for the new XML-based Flash image format FXG.

Despite all the improvements it’s unlikely that Illustrator CS4 will win over its critics. Compared with rivals such as Xara and CorelDRAW, the program is still heavy going. But the level of advanced creative control that Illustrator offers is unmatched, and this CS4 release adds important new features and makes existing power more accessible.