Adobe just came out with Illustrator CS4. The new Illustrator doesn't impress you with a plethora of new tools or flashy gimmicks. It instead improves upon usability and helping the user get more accomplished. It is all about workflow and streamlining your projects. CS4 is to graphic design what windshield wipers are for cars. It just helps make something already functional get much better.

One new feature that you will already be familiar with is work tabs. These are the same tabs that you work with in your web browser. So now instead of having a million windows open and having to sift through all your projects you will have all your projects open in a tab. Of course you can still drag out a tab and work with floating windows if you still want to.

There is also a new workspace menu on the application bar. It is basically a drop down menu with saved preset toolbar and palette configurations. So if you are working with typography you could have all your typography palettes open in a saved setting then switch to a different palette option for painting just from a quick drop down.

"Yes they finally did it, transparent gradients, thank you Adobe!" - In the gradient palette you can now just slide the opacity bar and modify a certain swatch on the gradient bar. This feature has been lacking too long from Illustrator and I know personally all too often how much this is needed.

So I think that designers are rejoicing at the changes made to Illustrator. There are many more changes than those listed here and I would encourage you to look into more upgrades. The changes are really going to help speed things up and quite literally time is money, especially in graphic design. There is always a deadline around the corner and now you just saved yourself some time with the new CS4 features.