Illustrator gets super-useful new tool for packaging design

Adobe has just announced some updates to Adobe Illustrator, and there's one in particular that designers working in packaging design, interior design and fashion will want to take note of. The new Dimension tool was previously available in beta and quickly became a firm favourite with testers; it's now available to everyone with Illustrator (get a free trial of Adobe CC here if you're not already signed up).

In a nutshell, Dimension streamlines the process of labelling the dimensions of product designs. You can now easily plot distances, angles and radii in your artwork and dimensions now scale as you resize your artwork. You can also customise settings of your dimensions including choosing your own custom units. You can adjust their position easily and hide and view dimensions at the click of a button. 

I haven't tried the Dimension tool yet but it looks like it's going to be a great tool for anyone working in packaging design, technical graphics, interior and architectural design and fashion and textile design. 

There are a number of other features that are new to Illustrator. Probably the most exciting of them all is the Text to Vector Graphics tool, which is currently in beta. With this AI tool, you can type in your text prompt and create a range of professional-looking vectors, including icons, scenes, subjects and patterns.

We initially reported on this feature when we saw it revealed at Adobe MAX, but Adobe has improved the tool since then, making the outputs look better and making it easier to control the results. You can now also rate the output (which was apparently a top user request) and you can specify up to 12 colours for patterns, rather than the five that were on offer previously.

All in all, it seems that Illustrator is catching up with Photoshop when it comes to having useful AI tools built in. We can't wait to see what's next. For more new Adobe tools, see our piece on how Adobe's new tool is being called 'Photoshop for audio'.