I’ve had a few performance issues myself over the years (with my PC, with my PC…) and the following has helped me.  But let’s be realistic – I’m running a Windows 7 x64, quad-core PC with 6Gb Ram and 2.5 Tb of drive space Raided up.  Illustrator CS4 still takes 15 seconds to boot.  Read how I sped it up a little.

1. Check your hardware – if you’re running an old 486 with 500 Mb of hard drive, then it’s just a sit and wait (forever) game!  Illustrator CS4 has minimum requirements of 2Ghz Processor, 1Gb recommended Ram, and 2Gb drive space for installation alone.  You might get away with less, but it’s more likely to limp like a retired old Lassie with it’s teeth missing.  Read more on the Adobe site for Illustrator CS4 System Requirements.
2. Scratch disk – yes, you can set this up similar to Photoshop, if you have 2 drives, and it helps with speed.  Go Edit > Preferences > Plug-ins & Scratch Disks.  Set your Secondary to C:\ (or wherever you have Illustrator installed) and your Primary to your ‘spare’ hard drive.
3. Fonts – Now, I’m sure plenty of us have done it.  Trying to find a nice new font to use on a project, and we accidentally download 10,000 free fonts for Illustrator!  On my machine, Illustrator went from 15 seconds to about 5 minutes on boot.  You can revert your fonts to the standard, Windows-installed fonts.  Caution is required here though.  First I created a ‘Font_Backup’ directory on C:\, and copied all my fonts over from C:\Windows\Fonts.Then I went through C:\Windows\Fonts and selected (Ctrl & click for multiple selection) all the fonts I didn’t want, and hit delete.  If you make sure to do the backup copy first, you know you can get them back if you need them.  If you open Illustrator for one of your projects, and it complains about a font being missing, you know to got to C:\Font_Backup (or wherever you chose to copy them to) and copy the font back to the Windows Font folder.
4. Display – if you have your Display performance cranked up, and Illustrator’s limping, then you can crank it down in Edit > Preferences > Units & Display Performance.  Look for the ‘Hand Tool’ option, and slide it over towards ‘Faster Updates’ to improve performance when you’re dragging artwork around your workspace.
5. Thumbnails – in the Layer palette, thumbnails are used to make identifying Layers easier.  To increase performance, go to the flyout menu at the top right of your Layers Palette, and select Panel Options.  Then de-select Thumbnails for Layers, Groups or Objects as you see fit.

Any other comments or tricks about improving the performance of Illustrator are welcome here, so if you have your own, feel free to comment.

If the glory of rounded corners and multiple background images and image layers can be handled within CSS3, then will there be any use for trusty old PS or Illustrator even?

I’m not sure as yet whether Css3 will be able to manage gradient images, I’m going to look into that one…

I’ll still use good ol’ Photoshop I think.  And Illustrator too – CSS3 will probably have to come a long way yet to negate the need for these two friends of most web designers.  Image editing, colour correction and I’d guess resizing will probably still be better done by the Adobe suite (or other, more open flavours of software if that’s your cup of tea!)

After using a mouse for so long on a PC, I wasn’t sure how this would go.  Installation turned out to be as simple as most other plug n play installations these days.  Even with Vista gettting involved.  A couple of discs to whizz through and you’re off.

My first impressions were along the lines of “This is weird….where’s my cursor gone…..why isn’t my hand working properly?…..and so on”, but after about 30 minutes, I suppose the 30+ years of using a ‘normal’ pen translated itself though my fingertips to the pen tablet, and bingo – it feels natural.  Pressure sensititvity and Adobe Illustrator’s (CS3) Paintbrush tool settings allow the creation of very smooth, curved vector lines and shapes.  Double-click on the Paintbrush icon in the Tools palette and up pop some nice options which aid the smoothness of the curves.   Something my hand would not be able to do naturally!

If you’re a left hander, the pen tablet could be even better than for ‘righties’ if you use your mouse in one hand and the pen in the other.  I love it.  An absolutely great tool for the creation of web and print graphics.  It’s going to be well used indeed during the website design process.  Josh Scruggs over at 26 Symbols talks a bit about the Bamboo too – follow this link to check out the 26 Symbols review of the Wacom bamboo.

Man-imitating-nature and all that – hexagons are the way forward here I think.  It all ties in to the theme of Graham’s website (all to do with project management), with the hexagons mirroring the steps and major stages of a project through to completion.

Another step closer to the go-live for this brand new Bournemouth web design, and looking forward to pushing the search marketing and SEO from there.