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*Good and tight*. That, in three words, could be my entire review because it describes how I felt when I first loaded Adobe Illustrator 8^..

When I write reviews, I like to do it over time. I look at the documentation, play with the features and get familiar with what I am going to write about. As I looked through the various tools, both new and old, I got the feeling of "tightness". I catch flack from my wife for doing it, but I like to relate things to cars. In this case, Adobe Illustrator 8 would be like a foreign sports car.  In other words, there are lots of nice features, it has quick action and handles well around tight corners. This as opposed to some cars (programs), that are big and sluggish like a large boat that will still get you there, but have poor gas mileage.

 When you have lead the pack for many years, it's tough to keep up the pace, but Adobe Illustrator 8 is still running strong. Any program that is enough of a standard to have most every other graphics program included an export filter to your first version is one to be reckoned with. But what makes Adobe Illustrator 8 so wonderful or not so wonderful? Most graphics programs have painting and drawing tools and easy ways to make shapes and then color and manipulate them, but just as in earlier versions, Adobe Illustrator 8 has gone way beyond this time around.

To begin with one of the most powerful features is the ability to use the great *layers* technology from Adobe PhotoShop^. and use it in Illustrator. I recall when I first started using PhotoShop 4, I complained that no vector programs used layers in that wonderful fashion. The Illustrator group at  Adobe must have thought the same thing and decided to incorporate it. While many companies write products that can be used together, no one has perfected the seamless transfer like Adobe. While I'm on the subject, some other tools the Illustrator group borrowed from PhotoShop include the *actions* palette and the Navigator Palette. Actions allow you use pre-made or create your own automations. For example, if you create a new style for buttons for a web page, you can save your steps and then play them back whenever you need to. For the Navigator Palette, all that needs said is: *Have you ever zoomed in too far on a graphic and gotten lost on your page?* OK, now you know what the Navigator Palette is for. It's an easy way to see just where you are on the page and to move around on it and zoom as well. In addition, PhotoShop users will remember the Free Form and the Scaling tools, which work very well in Adobe Illustrator 8.

In the totally new category, if you want things to look like they were made the old fashioned way, you will simply love the new Gradient Mesh.  It allows you to create the illusion that you used a real airbrush or watercolors as you can blend color in more than one direction at a time. For a vector program this is really cool. If you instead prefer different "brushes", you will be happy with the new Live Brushes that have been added in this new version. And if you are tired of having to use another program or taking lots of time to manually manipulate text to look right, you'll appreciate the new features added for text formatting. In that vein, while most programs have an entirely different set of tools for graphics and text, Adobe Illustrator 8 has gone beyond with the new eyedropper and paint bucket so now not only can you pick up and put down graphic attributes; you can do the same thing with text.