Illustrator CC has new panels for converting your design to CSS styles, working with fonts and color schemes.

CSS Properties Panel

As with Adobe^R Photoshop^R artists, many Illustrator^R artists create mockups of their web design in Illustrator and then need to convert it manually to CSS styles. These artists will be glad to see the new CSS Properties panel. You can generate CSS styles for one design element or the entire design. Also you have the option to copy/paste the CSS styles from the CSS Properties panel into an HTML webpage or export the styles as a .css style sheet which then can be linked to in the HTML.

Mobile App, Kuler and Illustrator

Inspiration comes from all over and the color scheme is one of the most important aspects of a design. Now with the Adobe Kuler^R mobile app, you can save those inspirational color schemes from anywhere.

Once you’ve collected all those color schemes, you can upload them to the Adobe Kuler website, where you will find 1000s of color schemes and even share some of your own. Sync them with Creative Cloud and your color schemes will be available in the Kuler panel in the Illustrator CC workspace. From there you can use the individual colors from the scheme the same way as you would swatches from the Swatches panel.

Font Menu

Fonts are an important part of any design that contains text. If you are like me, you have quite a few fonts on your computer and you spend a lot of time searching the list for the one you want to use. Now we have a search and filter feature at the top of the Font list. Just type in the name or even part of the font name to make it easier to find the desired font.

Although there is a visible representation of each font in the Font list, that only goes so far when choosing the perfect font for your design. I really like the new instant preview feature in Illustrator CC. You can select a section of text in your design, scroll through the font list with your arrow key and the selected text will change to display that text in each font on the list. This will be so helpful to those of us who need a little help visualizing how the text will look in each font. Finally, you will like that the font styles are now displayed under the font name in the font list. Just click on the font style of your choice from within the same panel.

When working in InDesign^R, you also have the Font Favorites feature which allows you to mark your most often used fonts with a small star at the left of the font name. Of course, you can then choose to display only your favorite fonts in the font list.

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Disclosure: I was not financially compensated for this article. Adobe supplied a Creative Cloud membership for the purpose of this review. The opinions are completely my own based on my experience.

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