Chapter 1 looks at the many improvements to stroke functionality in Adobe Illustrator CS5, including segmented art brushes, variable-width strokes, and improved control of dashed lines and arrowheads.
Beautiful Strokes
Segmented art brushes allow you to define non-stretchable areas within an art brush, therefore giving you more control over how art brushes start and finish.
In CS5 you can achieve more control over dashed lines, specifically how dashed lines behave on corners or joins. In addition, it has become much easier to add arrowheads to lines.
In this chapter, you'll learn about the new tools, modes, and features in Illustrator CS5 related to drawing and painting. Topics covered include the Bristle Brush, perspective grids, the Shape Builder, and joining paths.
Painting and Drawing
The Bristle Brush is a fantastic new tool that allows you to mimic the look and feel of traditional media such as watercolors or paint.
It is now possible to set 1/2/3-point perspective grids in Illustrator to draw graphics in perspective. This new feature gives you all the tools you need to add depth to your illustrations.
The Shape Builder tool lets you interactively create shapes on the fly without having to use the Pathfinder panel or commands. It offers a whole new way of defining shapes.
Chapter 3 discusses a grab-bag of other enhancements that have been made in Illustrator CS5. These include enhancements to Multiple Artboards, antialiasing, raster settings, and symbols.
Other Noteworthy Enhancements
Multiple Artboards were introduced in Illustrator CS4; in this new version it has become easier to use, reorder, end even rename them.
Antialiasing has always been a problem when creating artwork for the web in Illustrator. This is no longer the case thanks to PixelPerfect Drawing, which allows you to precisely align any design to a pixel grid and generate clean and crisp graphics for the web.
In the past, when you changed the Document Raster Settings, many raster-based effects (Photoshop Effects) would be displayed incorrectly. Illustrator now recalculates the parameters of these effects to match the new resolution.
Symbols are a very important feature in Illustrator. Now you can set nine-slice scaling for symbols, and also include any layer information within them.
Chapter 4 offers an introduction to CS Review, an online service that simplifies and speeds up design reviews with your co-workers and clients.
Online Services
In this video, you will learn how to create a new review in CS Review, navigate and annotate within CS review, and share files with others during the review process.
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