Review: Adobe Illustrator CS3 vector graphics software

Adobe’s take-over of Macromedia was particularly beneficial for Illustrator. For starters, it meant that Adobe was able to jettison Macromedia’s Freehand, leaving Illustrator as the unchallenged king of the professional vector graphics market.

Acquiring Flash from Macromedia also means Adobe is able to ensure that Illustrator CS3 and Flash work well together, making Illustrator the obvious choice for designers who want to create graphics for the web.

Multi-layered Illustrator drawings can now be exported directly into Flash, and you can select text or other elements and specify how Flash will treat them – perhaps animating one piece of text or prompting visitors to a web site to enter their own text into a form.

However, Adobe has also put a lot of effort into boosting Illustrator’s basic vector graphics tools. There are some nice little touches, such as the way that the editing points on a line are highlighted as the selection tool passes over them, making it easier to quickly select points and edit a drawing.

The Eraser tool has been improved as well. It now allows you to quickly delete parts of a vector drawing just as you would delete pixels in a bitmap image or digital photo.

As you erase a section of a drawing Illustrator automatically creates new lines along the edges of the erased area so that you still have a complete vector object to work with. This makes Illustrator a much more natural drawing tool, as you can draw and erase with freehand ease while still being able to edit with the precision of vector graphics.

With Freehand out of the way, and these additional new features providing improved ease of use, it seems that there’s little to stop Illustrator dominating the drawing market in the same way that Photoshop rules the photo-editing roost.