Review: Illustrator CC more refined than revolutionary
Illustrator CC is the first release of the famous illustration and vector graphics app under the company’s new Creative Cloud subscription-based brand. With this latest iteration—the 17th version of the software—the company puts greater emphasis on improving existing tools than on rolling out new ones. It’s a curious change of focus given all the fanfare surrounding the purchasing model, but the application is better for it.
Touch Type techniques
Illustrator CC’s most welcome upgrade is Touch Type, which lets you easily reposition, resize, and rotate characters within a block of text. In the past, you could use the Character panel to configure such changes, but this new method is much more intuitive. Clicking Touch Type in the Character panel enables you to select any character for manual alteration; when you select the character, control handles appear that let you resize and rotate it. You can also reposition the character just by dragging it around, which makes kerning adjustments and even nesting one character inside another quite easy. Meanwhile, the text remains fully editable so you can change the spelling or swap in a new font without losing the layout’s formatting. It’s an excellent way to create logo text without having to go through the hassle of tweaking numbers in the Character panel or converting text to outlines.
The Touch Type feature supports fast and fluid motion as you twist and tweak your text. Handy information boxes appear adjacent to the character as you make edits, showing you the exact scale, rotational angle, and baseline shift. The feature’s one disappointment is that unlike other tools, it doesn’t let you hold down the Shift key to constrain movements to either a horizontal or vertical plane. As you move a character left or right, you’ll almost certainly move the character up or down, too—and the only effective way to eliminate this unwanted baseline shift is by changing the numbers in the Character panel.
Reposition, resize, and rotate any character with a flick of your mouse.
Transformation
Another important usability change in Illustrator CC involves the upgraded Free Transform Tool. In previous versions of the app, this tool was confusing, with actions like Shear and Distort available only via awkward key-and-mouse combinations that were tricky to invoke. That situation has changed. Choosing the Free Transform Tool now calls up a small transparent palette with a number of options, including free transform, perspective distort, and free distort. The object is also overlaid with an upgraded, antialiased bounding box with contextual control points. Hover over a point, and the cursor changes to indicate what actions are available in that mode: rotate, resize, shear, or distort. It’s very intuitive, and I’ve found myself using it regularly for simple distortions that in the past I tried to achieve with either Envelope Distort or 3D Rotate.
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