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Illustrator is a new one for me since I haven’t used it before. Although I have read that it is a good tool for creating vector-based illustrations. I just might get some use out of that. I have read that it can be very useful together with Photoshop and Flash.

Apparently (again, since I’m just learning about it now), CS3 was a big update for Illustrator, possibly the biggest of the suite. It introduced several new tools, and updated the interface so it matches Photoshop and Flash. It looks good, and kind of familiar, as it somewhat resembles Photoshop, which I use regularly. Illustrator has a different toolset, and different actions and such. It’s a different kind of tool.

I have much reading and experimenting to do in order to get this application figured out. Veerle Pieters regularly publishes good Illustrator tutorials, some of which I’m going to go through myself. I have bookmarked her Transform Again in Illustrator and Create a coat of arms in Illustrator tutorials, and am going to be going through those. Great stuff.

There are more, I’m sure. I will be checking across the web for other useful resources. Hopefully I’ll get going with Illustrator soon!

Adobe did something interesting with Illustrator this time round. They added a feature called knowhow. It is accessed in Illustrator via the Window->Adobe Labs->knowhow menu. This shows another palette named, of course, knowhow. It can be kept standalone or dragged onto the right-hand sidebar, which is what I did, to keep it handy. When you select a tool or feature from the dropdown list, you can search for information, or view hints pertaining to the selected item. And you can choose to view the official Adobe help content, or community-generated information. The community information is a neat idea - Illustrator displays content by pulling entries from del.icio.us, tagged knowhow. This system will be self-maintaining, and will soon contain limitless information about this app.  Even if you don’t have Illustrator, or CS3, you can still browse the knowhow tag on the site.   Adobe made a good move with this feature. I know I will be keeping that palette open in my sidebar whenever I am working in Illustrator.

Not much of a review at this point, just initial impressions. I have some work cut out for me, that’s for sure.