The new upgrade to Illustrator^R CC has several new features for text, fonts, brushes and even web page coding. There is a new brush option for painting with images and new ways to convert your design to CSS styles.

Touch Type Tool

With the new Touch Type tool in the Character panel, we have more control over the design of the text in our projects all the way down to the individual letters. Previously, in order to work on the individual characters in a word or line of text, we needed to convert the text to outlines, ungroup and then edit the letter. Now, Illustrator CC has new controls for editing individual letters as to scale, rotation, repositioning and transforming vertically and horizontally, with the letter still part of the text object and therefore editable. Because it is still editable, we can control the font formatting and the other letters in the text object.

Once you click on a letter with the new Touch Type tool, you will see a box around the letter, a handle on each corner of the box and one handle slightly above the box at the top center. When you place your cursor over the upper left handle of the box, you will get a double arrow for vertical scaling. The handle in the center above the box is for rotating the letter. The upper right handle is for proportional scaling both vertically and horizontally. The lower right handle controls the horizontal scaling. The last handle is at the lower left and is used to move the baseline position of the letter. The Touch Type tool is very interactive, as it automatically shifts the surrounding letters as needed for the new position of the letter you have edited.

Once you have made adjustments to a letter with the Touch Type tool, all the letters in the text object itself remain editable. If you change the font of the entire word, the adjustments that were made to the edited letter in the word remain with the new font. You can even set each letter in the word to a different font.

Painting With Raster Images

With Illustrator CC, the Scatter, Art and Pattern brushes can be used to paint raster images. It is as simple as dragging and dropping the raster image onto the Brushes panel, which automatically opens a New Brush dialog box in which you can choose to apply the raster image to a Scatter, Art or Pattern brush.

If you have ever set a tiled pattern brush along a path that includes corners, you know how difficult it can be to get the corner tiles to fit the design. This task has been made much easier with the new Auto-Corners that will create perfect outer or inner corner tiles.

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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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