You don’t evolve to be a leader in helping companies and individuals optimize their creative workflows through stasis. You get there by continual improvement and fine-tuning. For Adobe, there’s no better resource for its evolution than its broader community of designers and users.
Your workflows evolve, and so must your tool kit. Adobe believes that user feedback is essential to the ongoing development of its suite of creativity tools. Beloved creative workhorses such as Illustrator and InDesign are where they are today because of community engagement and input.
Many of you will be heading to Miami for Adobe MAX and will hear more about new features born out of your feedback. Here’s a preview of ten of those user-driven improvements that are available now or coming soon at MAX.
Available Now (Update Your Apps!)
Auto-Measure and Plot Dimensions in Illustrator
The Dimension tool arose from your feedback that it was too time-consuming to add dimensions to projects manually. Every time dimensions changed, you had to repeat the manual process.
Illustrator’s Dimension tool automatically measures and plots dimensions such as distances, angles, and radii in your work. This feature is handy when you want to add dimensions to product packaging, fashion patterns, and interior designs, for example, or in the handoff to clients or production.
Now, with the additional improvements in the latest update, you can:
- Create custom scales
- Measure the distance between any two points
- Modify your artwork, and the dimensions will auto-update
Check out the Dimension tool in Illustrator’s left-side toolbar.
Manage Document Changes with Ease with InDesign’s New History Panel
With complex multi-page projects such as magazines and catalogs, designers often go through multiple time-consuming iterations when the planned number of advertisements or products changes during the design process. Then, right as you send the files to preflight, products are suddenly back in inventory, or a last-minute ad comes through.
This time-consuming and all-to-frequent scenario explains why Adobe received hundreds of votes in InDesign’s UserVoice to “Please add a history panel to InDesign, like Photoshop’s.” You asked, and Adobe listened.
More Precision with Illustrator’s Enclosed Selection Mode for the Rectangular Marquee Tool
Designers and illustrators requested more precision in the selection mode when working with intricate and crowded artworks, especially detailed illustrations. Adobe agreed.
Now, you can choose to select only fully enclosed objects. The default marquee selection will continue to select objects partially included in the marquee. To switch to the enclosed mode, press E once as you drag the marquee.
Draw Stars as Live Shapes in Illustrator
Designers love Adobe’s live shape tools in Illustrator. However, your feedback was that creating and editing stars was time-consuming to adjust manually, which is why Adobe brought the Star tool to Illustrator.
Now, you can dynamically configure your star in a few clicks, quickly making adjustments via the on-screen controls or the transform panel, saving you significant time.
Export Illustrator Files as PDFs in Seconds
Many of you told Adobe that Illustrator needed to give you the ability to export as PDF easily. The team worked together to address the old multi-step process of converting to PDF and delivered an export PDF function, already getting positive feedback.
You can now export your Illustrator files in PDF format with a click of a button. The exported PDF is optimized for shareability and reduced file size. Any changes made to the PDF during the review process are compatible when you bring the file back into Illustrator. Select ‘export as’ from the file menu and choose the PDF format from the dropdown.
Extend Images with Generative Expand in InDesign
This summer, Adobe introduced Generative Expand in beta to help designers handle one of their most common layout frustrations — images that don’t quite fit. Adjusting images can be time-consuming. Generative Expand, powered by Adobe Firefly, solves this problem by seamlessly expanding images in InDesign to fit any layout.
Adobe’s goal is continuously enhancing InDesign for smoother workflows and greater creative control, in close collaboration with users, so keep the feedback rolling in.
Coming Soon at MAX
Here’s a preview of four highlighted productivity improvements being rolled out at MAX. Make sure to update your Illustrator and InDesign apps on October 14 to see them in action.
Resize Artwork with Artboard in Illustrator
Designers working in Illustrator organize their projects in artboards on the canvas and resize their projects based on their client’s needs, especially for branding and marketing projects. Each project typically has many assets on an artboard, and resizing each piece within an artboard is a time-consuming, manual process — and you asked Adobe to develop “a feature to scale a whole artboard with its content.”
Now you can choose if the artwork within your artboard scales automatically as you resize your artboard. Select the artboard tool, then choose ‘scale art with artboard’ in the properties/control panel.
Support for MathML in InDesign
Many of you publishing technical documents, books, and manuals in InDesign, told Adobe about your need for MathML support. Typesetting, inputting, and maintaining math formulas for the layout and publishing of technical documents, books, and manuals, requires a lot of time and effort. Baselines must be manually manipulated, and adjustments can be tedious.
Adobe listened to you and developed the first version of MathML support for InDesign. Now you can ingest MathML as an SVG and update the expression from within InDesign. Expression styles can be modified by adjusting the font size and color to match the rest of your document design.
Quickly Create Gradients in Illustrator
You want to create gradients to add depth to your illustrations, brand graphics, and marketing or advertising designs. But, right now, this requires using the gradient slider and manually choosing colors, which takes a lot of time, especially if you only want to get a gradient for two colors.
Adobe has been working diligently to improve this. Now, you can create gradients directly from your selected colors in Illustrator’s swatch panel. Just drag and drop them onto the gradient panel or click the ‘create gradient’ option in the swatch menu.
Fun fact: It’s the first-ever tool that can sense gradients in your work!
Open and Edit InDesign Files in Adobe Express
Who doesn’t want to minimize the number of templates you need to create for other teams?! In an ideal world, you’d make one standard template that can be edited for content (i.e., if the marketing or sales teams need to make minor changes like dates, pricing, or location) without affecting the original template. You told Adobe this — repeatedly, and their team’s ears were burning. Now you can do this easily with a seamless Adobe Express integration for InDesign.
Export and open an InDesign document directly in Adobe Express, then edit the content or lock elements within Adobe Express ensuring brand consistency and guidelines before sharing the document with other Adobe Express users.
Performance Enhancements are Always on Tap
Adobe’s relentless focus is on improving the performance and responsiveness of computationally intensive tasks—functions that require significant computing power and resources to process, like placing multiple images, embedding linked images, or opening documents with many linked images.
As designers, you frequently perform these tasks throughout your day, occasionally leading to slower response times while working. No one likes to wait, so Adobe is bringing multithreading capabilities to Illustrator. Multithreading will allow Illustrator to perform multiple tasks concurrently to improve efficiency and responsiveness, meaning less waiting for you.
The process is complex, and you may initially notice more impact in some areas than others as Adobe fully implements improvements across the application. Adobe has already implemented periodic document backups, snapping guide generation, and thumbnail generation for layers, with much more to come.
Multithreading improvements are available now in Illustrator’s Beta build (your computer must have a multi-core processor to take advantage of multithreading fully). You can try the Beta app through the Creative Cloud Desktop App. First, open the Creative Cloud Desktop App, then navigate to the “Beta apps” section.
For more information, follow the @AdobeDesign Instagram channel as they highlight each one of these features over the next ten days. Look for five more productivity features to be unveiled next week.
If you have feedback you’d like to share, Adobe would love to hear from you. Tag#AdobeIllustrator or #AdobeInDesign on social media or add ideas at illustrator.uservoice.com (for Illustrator) or illustrator.uservoice.com (for InDesign).
Adobe’s community-driven ethos also comes to life through its support of young visionaries who blend art and technology in unprecedented ways through the Young Lions Competition at the Cannes Lions Festival of Creativity and Adobe Digital Edge Awards (DEA). These two competitions celebrate the talent and ingenuity of today’s rising innovators in art and communication while helping them build their careers through industry connections and a robust skill set in Adobe tools.