Road to MAX: 10 highly requested features for Illustrator and InDesign to boost your productivity

Road to MAX: 10 highly requested features for Illustrator and InDesign to boost your productivity

Our global community has always been instrumental in helping us build our professional design tools. After all, your feedback helps us shape the ongoing innovation in both Illustrator and InDesign, by either bringing in new features or improving existing ones to optimize creative workflows, expressiveness, power and precision so you have more time to focus on the work you love.

Finding ways to optimize your workflows is a continuing journey, and some of our new features are much loved instantly while others need further fine-tuning. And that's where you come in: Your feedback is essential as we develop Illustrator and InDesign to evolve as your workflows evolve. We're listening - our product, design, and engineering teams are addressing your highly-requested feature improvements.

The road to MAX: Optimize your workflow with these 10 user-driven features

Adobe MAX is just a few short weeks away, and we're looking forward to meeting many of you in-person in Miami Beach or having you join us online in October. As we prepare for Adobe MAX, we're excited to highlight 10 Illustrator and InDesign productivity-related features that were driven directly from your feedback.

We'll be highlighting them on the @AdobeDesign Instagram channel one-by-one over the next 10 days, but you're getting an early preview in this blog. Find out about which features you can already use in the app today, and come back next week when we'll add a sneak preview of what we'll release at MAX.

Also, if you don't see one of these features in Illustrator or InDesign, please make sure your application is updated by visiting the Creative Cloud app and checking for "Updates Available" (or click here for Illustrator).

Let's get started!

#1 Measure and plot dimensions in Illustrator in a few clicks (available now)

The Dimension tool came to life after we received feedback from so many of you that it was too time consuming to manually add dimensions to your work. And every time dimensions changed, you had to repeat this manual process yet again. Examples of UserVoice asks included: "A tool to automatically dimension signs would be an advantage to those of us working in the sign industry who create visuals for clients" and "The Dimension tool needs to have live updates".

Illustrator's Dimension tool automatically measures and plots dimensions such as distances, angles, and radii in your artwork. This can be useful when you want to add dimensions to product packaging, fashion patterns, and interior designs, for example, or for handoff to clients or production.

After launching the Dimension tool a few months ago, we knew our job was not done. Since then, we've been listening to your feedback, and as a result of those conversations, incorporated additional improvements into the latest update, like adding custom scales, the ability to measure the distance between any two points, or having dimensions auto-update as you modify the artwork. And we will continue to improve it per your guidance, so check out the Dimension tool (you'll find it in the left-side toolbar) and let us know what you think.

#2 Manage document changes with ease with InDesign's new History Panel (available now)

With complex documents, a designer's project will usually go through multiple time-consuming iterations. For example, you create a page layout for a retail magazine that's planned to have a number of products, but during the design process, some of the products become backordered and need to be removed from the layout.

But - wait! Right as the files are sent to preflight, the products are suddenly back in inventory and you need to include them after all. That's all time-consuming work that you'd rather not have to do, which is why we received over 360 votes in InDesign's UserVoice to "Please add a history panel to InDesign, like Photoshop's".

Thanks to your votes, the History Panel in InDesign was born! You can browse the list of actions taken on any InDesign document in a session. You can then revert your document to a selected state, delete one, or create a new document from it. In the above example, rather than painstakingly having to redo the layout with each change, the designer can easily revert back to the state where the appropriate products are displayed.

#3 Select with precision with Illustrator's Enclosed Selection Mode for the Rectangular Marquee tool (available now)

You told us that as designers and illustrators, you need more precision when working with intricate and crowded artworks, especially detailed illustrations (and we agree!). A key ask was to be able to "Select ONLY the objects ENTIRELY inside the selection window marquee". This is now possible with the Enclosed Rectangular Marquee Selection. Now you can select to have only fully enclosed objects be selected. The default marquee selection will continue to select objects that are partially included in the marquee.

To switch to the enclosed mode, just press E once as you drag the marquee. Thanks again for the great suggestion!

#4 Save time by drawing stars as live shapes in Illustrator (available now)

Our live shapes such as the rectangle, ellipse, and polygon tools in Illustrator have been popular with designers. We heard that creating and editing stars was time-consuming to adjust manually, which is why we brought the Star tool to Illustrator.

Because the star is now a live shape, you have the flexibility to dynamically configure your star the way you like in just a few clicks, easily making adjustments via the on-screen controls or the transform panel. As a result, you'll save a significant amount of time that you'd otherwise spend on manually adjusting the shape.

#5 Export Illustrator files as PDFs in seconds (available now)

Many of you told us that Illustrator needed the ability to export as PDF since saving a PDF in Illustrator was an arduous multistep process. Our teams worked together to address your key pain points and delivered an export PDF function that is already getting positive feedback.

You can now export your Illustrator files in PDF format with just a click of a button. The exported PDF is optimized for shareability and reduced file size. Changes you or a client make to the PDF are compatible when you bring the file back to Illustrator. Select 'export as' from the file menu and choose the PDF format from the dropdown.

Always on tap: Making continuous performance enhancements

Let's get under the hood for a bit. One key area we're relentlessly focusing on is improving the performance and responsiveness of computationally intensive tasks. Those are tasks that you may not realize require a significant amount of computing power and resources to process, like placing multiple images, embedding linked images, or opening documents with many linked images.

Yet these tasks are frequently performed throughout the day and can occasionally lead to slower response times while you're working. No one likes to wait, which is why we're bringing multithreading capabilities to Illustrator. Multithreading will allow Illustrator to perform multiple tasks concurrently to improve efficiency and responsiveness, enhancing the performance of these tasks aka less wait for you.

But it's a complex process, and you may initially notice more impact in some areas vs others as we fully implement improvements across the application. Some of our progress so far includes periodic document backups, snapping guide generation, thumbnail generation for layers with much more coming soon.

Let us know what you think - multithreading improvements are available to try right now in Illustrator's Beta build (note that your computer needs to have a multi-core processor to fully take advantage of multithreading). The Beta app is accessible through the Creative Cloud Desktop App:

1. Open the Creative Cloud Desktop App
2. Navigate to the "Beta apps" section
3. Look for the Illustrator Beta and download it to experience these performance enhancements firsthand

Come back here next week!

We still have 5 more productivity features to unveil. Next we'll include some that will be announced at Adobe MAX (but you'll be the first to learn about them), so make sure to come back to this blog for more details and follow us @AdobeDesign along the way.

Have feedback on our apps? We'd love to hear from you. You can tag #AdobeIllustrator or #AdobeInDesign in your social post or add ideas at illustrator.uservoice.com (for Illustrator) or illustrator.uservoice.com (for InDesign).

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