Adobe Illustrator CS5 review

Adobe Illustrator is the industry standard for anyone designing and editing vectors, launched back in 1988, it’s got a pedigree older than most of the designers using it.

We check out the new features and upgrades to the CS5 edition, released earlier this year.

What we like most

The painting tools have had an overhaul. Notably there’s the new Bristle Brush tip which gives you complete freedom of choice over size, type, scale and length of brush along with opacity and stiffness of paint, giving you a range of effects normally confined to Photoshop.

You can now also change the weight and thickness along parts of a stroke, rather than applying it to the whole stroke. The new Draw Inside and Draw Behind functions, as the names suggest, allow you to draw inside and behind shapes on a layer. You could do this in CS4 by setting a clipping mask over the area after painting, but these functions are a great time saver.

The new perspective drawing tool transforms your flat board into a 3D space, and allows you to draw onto different planes.

What we like least

The new perspective grids are great but you can’t type on them, meaning you have to draw text boxes separately and then use perspective tools to try and match them to the grid perspective.

Secondly some appearances won’t change; for example a 20pt line can stay at 20pt all the way into the horizon.

Illustrator isn’t intended for novice users, but even so the interface is pretty complex and some of the processes, such as the new Draw Inside feel less than intuitive.