Illustrator

If you need to adjust your artboard size to the size of the artwork there is a simple trick to get this done. Simply edit the artboard and click the artwork. The artboard will immediately adjust to the mimimum size to fit your vector artwork.

Adobe is giving away 1,000 of these rather nice posters. Only downside is that it will cost you a Facebook Like and sharing your friends list.

They've been a long time coming but plugins for Creative Suite applications that make it possible to browse and preview fonts from vendors directly within layouts are finally becoming available. The FontShop plugin, which seems to be stuck in a perpetual beta mode, was first released for Photoshop. Support has now been extended to Mac and Windows Illustrator CS3-CS6.

Arriving two years after CS5, and a year after CS5.5, CS6 is now available for pre-order, with Adobe promising delivery "within 30 days." Adobe's subscription-based Creative Cloud takes a central role in the massive release, which includes 14 CS6 applications and four Creative Suites. The all-you-can download plan is yours for $49.99 per month, which is the cost if you sign up for an annual contract (it's $74.99 per month for month-to-month membership).

Hard to believe that Adobe Illustrator first saw the light of day 25 years ago. If you're feeling nostalgic you can watch Adobe co-founder John Warnock demonstrate Illustrator 1.1 above or Illustrator 88 (the second version) below. And jumping forward, the final clip is a sneak peak of Illustrator CS6, showing some of its new pattern creation functionality.

Specifically designed to help you to improve your creative workflow in Adobe Illustrator, DrawScribe takes the jobs you do day in and day out, and just like all the other plugins that have been brought to you by Astute Graphics, it makes them so much easier.

Adobe® Creative Cloud™ is a creative hub where you can explore, create, publish, and share your work using Adobe Creative Suite® desktop applications, Adobe Touch Apps, and services together for a complete ideation-to-publishing experience. The vision of Adobe Creative Cloud is to turn previously difficult, disparate workflows into one intuitive, natural experience, allowing you to create freely and deliver ideas on any desktop, tablet, or handheld device.

Excerpted from Adapted from Illustrator CS5 Bible (Wiley Publishing)

By Ted Alspach

In what follows I walk you through a project that uses all sorts of Illustrator functions and explain how and why I used Illustrator’s capabilities throughout the process.

Excerpted from Real World Adobe Illustrator CS5 (Peachpit Press)

By Mordy Golding

Certain Illustrator features, such as Pathfinder, are incredibly useful and, as a result, are used many times a day. Features such as 3D are also extremely cool, but they aren’t used as often. Every once in a while, a feature comes along in Illustrator that is cool and fun to use but that is also practical enough that you use it on a regular basis. Live Trace is such a feature.

Full press release below.