Adobe illustrator is an essential member in the CS3 family. It is also an essential point in the design workflow. The new Adobe Illustrator CS3 increases the integration between other CS3 family especially Adobe flash. The noticeable feature that you will see from the first time you run Illustrator that its UI interface unify with the other products in the CS3 packages, which allows much more flexibility, space saving and ability to customize the look of the interface according to your own needs (figure1).

Figure1. New Adobe Illustrator CS3 interface

Next, we will see some of the features that remark this version of Adobe Illustrator CS3.

• Live Color:
With the Live Color new tool, you can easily explore and choose different color theme fro your artwork with an easy to use Live Color panel (figure2).

Figure2. How the Live Color works in Illustrator CS3

You can choose from current color combinations, edit or create you own from the color wheel. Also, you can save you selections or delete current combination. Each color combination is resampled with a color palette in the Color Group section in the Live Color panel (figure3)

Figure3. Live Color panel in Adobe Illustrator CS3
• Crop Area tool
The Crop Area tool enables you to crop your artwork. This feature can be used for cropping animated parts in your artwork and supports the safe-mode view for the cropped areas.

• Integration with Adobe Flash
Now, you can copy you artwork directly from Illustrator and paste it into Flash with preserving groups, symbols, mask, layers and object properties (figure4).

Figure4. Copy and Paste directly from Illustrator CS3 to Flash

Adobe Illustrator also shows deep integration with other Adobe products including Adobe Photoshop, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Golive and Adobe Flex 2.

• Device Central
With Adobe Device Central, it is easy to get your artwork to mobile device as well as setting the mobile device profile you desire for your output.

These are the key features in the new Adobe Illustrator CS3, and for more information about the rest of the features, you can visit Adobe Illustrator CS3 page on Adobe site:
http://www.adobe.com/products/illustrator/

You can get you version of Illustrator CS3 for $ 599 and upgrade your current version for $ 199.