by Adobe continues to refine its flagship illustration tool with Illustrator CC 2014, a minor update with just a handful of feature additions. Interestingly, many more new features were introduced to the vector app with the mid-cycle Illustrator CC 17.1 update in January. A number of these earlier additions merit discussion, and combined with the enhancements in CC 2014, they address one of the longest-standing complaints I’ve had with the application.
Better tools
In my past Illustrator reviews, I have consistently lamented the application’s anemic object tools. Select the rounded rectangle tool, click the artboard and you’d be asked to specify the corner radius; once the radius was determined, it was locked in and uneditable. Stretch the object in one direction, and the corners would stretch and distort, too. Similarly, the star and polygon tools provided little in the way of settings, and those too were locked in once set. Creating a star with rounded corners or a polygon in the shape of gear was a logistical nightmare for even the most hardened Illustrator veterans.
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