Adobe has been selling Illustrator as part of a bundled set of tools nearly since its release, and Illustrator is one (albeit important) part of any work flow process that involves CMYK color separations and working for print scale resolutions. The current set of tools is called Creative Suite and we’re in the fourth iteration of the Creative Suite package of software.

Illustrator ‘plays nice’ with nearly any vector file format; largely this is because Illustrator uses Postscript (with extensions) as its internal file format, just like its competitors programs did. This means that nearly any other vector format that can be imported or exported to .AI or .EPS formats can be used within Illustrator.

That said, Illustrator is also capable of importing and exporting files from the majority of Adobe’s other software products, in particular Flash (a competing, low resolution web friendly vector format suitable for animations) and Photoshop Native files.

Illustrator’s files can, in turn, be opened by Adobe Flash and Adobe Photoshop, as well as Adobe InDesign. (Indeed, one of the nicest features of InDesign, provided you have enough memory, is that you can tell it to ‘edit the original file’ and it will launch Illustrator or Photoshop for you.

One common question from people just getting started with graphic design is “Why Illustrator AND Photoshop AND Flash”. The reasons stem from the different types of graphics files they generate and are designed to manipulate; while Illustrator and Photoshop have been converging in capabilities over the last few releases, Illustrator is designed to be a vector format editor (where the graphic is defined in Postscript format as a series of strokes and fills, each with a different color) and Photoshop is a raster editor, where the graphic is expressed as a series of pixels with an X-Y coordinate and a color.

Vector formats have the advantage of being scalable – you can blow them up as large as you like, and they won’t turn jagged on you or pixellate. Raster formats are much less computationally intensive, and have a wider user base; they’re also the natural format for anything scanned in to a computer or shot with a digital camera.

Flash is a vector format with additional information suitable for web site work, including the ability to program in it and make animations and interactive interfaces. Each of these formats requires a different editing tool, and Illustrator is one of the three.

One of the great things about CS4 is that Adobe has been putting more work into making the interfaces (and as many of the keyboard commands) consistent between packages; if you use a Magic Paintbrush tool in Photoshop, it will have nearly identical dialogs and behave the same in Illustrator. If you know where something is on a menu in Photoshop, you’ve got a good chance of finding it in a similar place in Illustrator. That said, they’re doing this slowly and in stages, because they don’t want to strand users of older versions of the software by rendering their memory of where things are obsolete; Adobe saw the flak Microsoft tool over Office 2007 and is going more gradually on this front.