Introducing Creative Suite CS4

This morning, I woke up early like other true design fanatics to watch the live launch of Adobe Creative Suite CS4. Adobe featured 1-hour streaming video from 9-10am introducing all the new tricks of the software. Here's a recap of some of the most relevant features in the design applications. If you've gotten into the habit of going far beyond the measurements of your artboard in Illustrator, have no fear--the "pages" aspect of InDesign has now been integrated into Illustrator through multiple artboards. You can create them at multiple sizes and place them wherever you want in your document. They can even overlap, and you can import individual artboards into InDesign books or even save individual artboards for web. There is a new way to paint, called the "Blob Brush" that creates outline-filled objects instead of paths with brushstrokes applied to them. The new outline-filled objects are easy to erase and are a quick-and-easy way to illustrate. Lastly, the appearance palette is now definitely going to be a more frequently used and is finally a more functional palette. You will be able to change all the properties of an object or multiple objects at the same time. In InDesign, you can set specific parameters and then an error window will pop up if you go against them. In Photoshop, you can squish an image with it being aware of the content of the image; for example, it won't squish people but rather the useless pixels of space between people. You can also now use a series of 2D images and stitch them together and create a 3D image from them. You can even place a 2D image into the 3D image. Crazy. It should be interesting to see how long it takes for CS4 to disseminate into the design world. Obviously it's a big investment for studios, but Adobe promises its update will save time and make designers work more efficiently in the future.

See these links for videos with more new features of CS4:
Illustrator: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1554v1699
InDesign: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1556v1689
Photoshop: http://tv.adobe.com/#vi+f1556v1686

Example of Illustrator's artboards: