Introducing Illustrator CC 2019

This year’s major release of Adobe Illustrator CC is full of colourful innovations. Whether you’re a beginner or an expert, you’ll find something exciting in this new version of Illustrator. Many features this year are powered by Adobe Sensei.

Freeform gradients
Create natural and photorealistic gradients.
Adobe previewed a new gradient type earlier this year that lets you create gradients with rich colours and organic blends like never before. In addition to Linear and Radial Gradients, the new Freeform Gradients allow you to colour your objects in a way that looks natural and photo-realistic.
With Freeform Gradients, all you need to do is drop “points” of colour on your object. These points of colour then blend together to form rich, complex colour blends which were not possible before. What’s more, the user interface is simple and easy to use.

Global Edits
Make instantaneous edits across your artboards.
If you have similar objects (like logos or icons) throughout your project, you can now easily change colours, edit shapes, and rotate your objects in a few simple steps. Global Editing lets you select, find, and edit similar objects across artboards. Unlike features like Symbols or Select Similar, Global Editing is more versatile. No setup is required, and you have more flexibility to make the changes you want.

Custom toolbar
Organize your workspace the way you want it.
Whatever you need to create, Illustrator has the tools for you, over 80 and counting. Now Adobe is giving you a new way to organize, customize, and keep track of all your most-used tools. With this update, we organized all the tools into groups so you can understand at a glance what all the tools are and what they do. If you have certain tool sets that you use most often, now you can drag and drop to create your custom tool menu. Your Illustrator workspace can now be tailored to your working style.

Adobe Fonts Integration
Access 14,000+ fonts for your projects.
With this release, you can look forward to a vastly improved experience of exploring and finding the right font within Illustrator. With direct integration with Adobe Fonts, you can now access the 14,000+ fonts that come with your Creative Cloud license directly within Illustrator CC. You can preview fonts in your design without activating them, and if you like what you discover, it takes just one click to activate and license that font — all at no charge as part of your Creative Cloud membership.

Illustrator and InDesign CC Sneak Video – Adobe Fonts Integration

Even more enhancements
In addition to new features, Illustrator CC continues to improve on the experience you know and love. You can always visit our release notes for a detailed breakdown of the additions with this release. Here are just a few of the exciting enhancements Adobe made:

• Scalable interface
  Illustrator now identifies screen resolution and adjusts the display accordingly. This means there is an optimal default scaling of the interface based on the display resolution. Better yet, Adobe have added the ability to set the scale of your design workspace.
• True-size view
  Illustrator CC will now automatically adapt zoom value with resolution of the display to render artwork in actual size at 100 percent zoom. So a business card rendered as 100 percent on any screen will have the same dimensions as it would in print.
• External GPU support
  Illustrator can use external graphic processing units (GPU) on Macintosh computers with Thunderbolt 3 running macOS 10.13.14 and above.
• Trim view
  This new preview method displays artwork as if it were to be printed, suppressing all non-printing objects on the artboard, like grids, guides, etc. All artwork falling outside of the artboard is hidden in this view. This new method gives you a good way to preview your final designs.
• Presentation mode
  You can now use an Illustrator file to directly present your work. In this new mode, each artboard becomes a slide. The application menu, panels, guides, and frame edges are hidden so your audience can focus on your designs and not be distracted by the application.
• Performance enhancements
  This latest release consists of a number of under-the-hood improvements, including more than 30 fixes that have been made based on user feedback from the Illustrator User Voice page.