Drawing Tools & Controls 

The power of Illustrator lies mostly in its superb drawing tools. Illustrator CS3 take it even further. Improvements to making selections is easier also, a nice addition to Illustrator CS3, users can work faster through new improvements such as the display of the handle at the opposite end of the segment so you can get a better understanding and feel of curves with the option to set a preference for the size which anchor points are shown.

The Eraser tool allows you erase vector artwork using a brush, anchor points no longer have to be deleted individually to accomplish this, but all layers can be erased if you are not in a selection or portions of your artwork locked. Isolation mode allows you to edit objects in a group without disturbing other of parts of an illustration. I consider it a very handy new feature in Illustrator CS3 that makes it easy to select a group, sub-layer and work on it with peace of mind that it won't alter the surrounding artwork. Note that you can achieve this to a certain degree in Illustrator CS2 by grouping and locking layers but it was tedious and at times frustrating, Illustrator CS3 cuts down the effort needed and just makes it a natural part of the application’s workflow.

Live Color 

Working with color is very inviting and attractive in this release. You can explore, apply and control color variations easily, it’s probably the best feature of this release so far. Live Color lets you select any artwork and interactively edit the colors to see results instantly. You can use the Color Guide panel to quickly choose tints, shades, or harmonious combinations analogous, Triad and Monochromatic. Providing a 1,2,3 step approach to creating excellent color schemes with no effort. The simplicity of creating your schemes allows you to experiment and go through a range of choices that gives the designer the flexibility to get more out of your work. Colour Swatches can be mapped to colour schemes across Pantone's library along with spot, metallic and other desired finishes. Swatches can be saved as Adobe Swatch Exchange Libraries which, can be edited, saved and used within the rest of Creative Suite 3. Adobe Swatch Exchange files also now have color previews in Adobe Brigde CS3 as well as meta data so you can find a particular swatch or swatch group.

Working with Flash 

Flash and Illustrator have long been pals and share a common bond when it comes to working with vector art. The Illustrator CS3 release strengthens this relationship with stronger integration and the ability to easily import Illustrator files into Flash CS3 Professional, or copy and paste artwork from Illustrator to Flash with paths, anchor points, gradients, clipping masks and symbols all intact. Layers, groups, and object names, colour schemes and profiles including video and film settings and NTSC CV are also supported. The thing that’s really powerful here is the actual workflow process for a group of designers, for instance, an expert designer in Illustrator can feel right at home creating their artwork in their principal application especially now with the deeper/stronger support of print, web, video/film. A Flash user can then take that Illustrator’s artwork and further manipulate it and easily take it to the next level by doing things like adding Dynamic Text which is now scriptable, making content from Illustrator easier to animate and control in Flash CS3. That focus on making the applications meant for each other in addition being able to be independent of each other creates a really powerful design experience with the CS3 releases of these programs and the Creative Suite 3 in general.

Illustrator CS3 is very responsive and performs well based on my usage, the application loads content faster, tasks such as faster screen redraw, object moving, panning scaling and transformation are very responsive.

Final Comments

As I previously said of the power in this release of Illustrator, Adobe has really modernized an industry standard, making it relevant and easy to use with its new siblings. Along with a streamlined interface that focuses on designing more effectively and efficiently. This is definitely a release for every designer to own.