Along with its Raster Editor and Page Layout CS5 suite-mates, Photoshop and InDesign, Illustrator (version 15) has a mature appetite for system resources. The application is much speedier than previous iterations, especially on 64-bit systems, but that savings can be blunted with the increased resource demands for some new features, like the new Bristle Brush (more on that later).

It might be wise to expect a certain degree of the graphic design equivalent of feature creep in Illustrator drawings. Typically, time saving improvements lead to more complicated designs to use up the time available. Especially if the time savings are introduced with new features that might increase the overall complexity of a drawing.

We found the workhorse Gradient Mesh tool much more nimble than in previous versions. Consequently, we created a much more involved set of files for our complexity series, terminating with the most complex file of that series, AIXV61CC.ai, which contains 785 gradient meshes vs. 40 in our CS4 version.

Adobe apparently anticipates some printing issues with the new Bristle Brush tool since it comes with its own warning message. The Bristle Brush is a very interesting and useful tool in that it allows a customizable selection of brushes that are much more natural to use and have a very much more “rastery” feel (soft, transparent, fuzzy edges for example) yet maintain an editable Bezier curve for very precise placement and construction.

We get this error message when printing some files in our Illustrator CS5 ATS IF file set, such as AIXV71CC.ai, a seven art-board collection of Illustrator-created logos – see Bristle Brush detail from the Clairenez logo below. However, we found that the file printed correctly on our set of development printers (with the notable exception of some printer/drivers systems still printing noticeable bounding boxes, in most instances where type is used in conjunction with transparent objects whether they are Bristle Brushes, Gradient Mesh or transparent fill object).

The Adobe Illustrator CS5 ATS-IF is available now on QualityLogic's Storefront.