And Illustrator CS4’s Appearances panel helps in this regard: it has been completely reworked to make it a powerful control centre for advanced formatting. Perhaps the biggest benefit of artboards is that they help ensure that layout variations share the same overall look and feel. They make it simple, for example, to quickly rework the same advert for different column widths.
Where Illustrator’s artboards come into their own is when handling multiple variations of the same design. And, when you print or export to PDF, each artboard can be output as its own page. It does improve navigation of collections of artwork, however, allowing you to quickly page through artboards with the Artboard Navigator at the bottom of the document window. And don’t think that Illustrator is competing directly with InDesign for producing multiple-page publications either – it lacks features such as automatic text flow. These aren’t typical pages as most people think of them, as they all appear onscreen simultaneously.
The biggest sign that Adobe has been listening to its users is that Illustrator CS4 at last supports multiple pages, or “Artboards”. For painting-style illustration it’s a liberating release. And, as with paint, where strokes of the same colour overlap they combine into a single object. Illustrator CS3 laid down lines as stroke paths, but with the Blob brush you lay down a filled shape, so it’s more like painting than drawing. I doubt if many people in 2014 are using this 'old' version of Illustrator, but let me say that if a person dedicates the 1,000 hands-on-hours (more or less) needed to truly master Illustrator 10 then there is virtually nothing offered in current versions that you cannot accomplish with this 12 year old version of Illustrator. Illustrator CS4 also sees the addition of extra drawing power in the form of Blob brushes. The Adobe 10 Illustrator Classroom in a Book is an excellent tutorial. When defining colour stops, for example, you can now set opacity, which means it’s much easier to create graduated transparency effects. Now, all that control has been moved to the object being worked on. In CS3 this was awkward to use, and involved setting parameters and colour stops in a discrete Gradient panel. Another area that has been reworked to make it more powerful and intuitive is Illustrator’s gradient handling.