Adobe CS2 is fun

I recently convinced my office to get me a copy of Adobe Creative Suite CS2 so that I can make more professional media for release; I had used my copies of Photoshop 5 and Illustrator CS1 to make some decent flyers and stuff which sealed the deal. But CS2 is new to me, and I'm trying out all the new options, and in particular one new feature in Illustrator called "live trace" which instantly turns pixel graphics into vector graphics. Vector graphics are better because they can be sized down and up ad infinatum without any pixelization or loss.

As an example, take this image of Flexo I found on the internet. Press a single button, and it changes it into a vector graphic. Then you are free to use "live paint" quickly and easily fill up the different spots with different colors. Never before has been using colors in Illustrator been this easy; now it a snap to show different possible color schemes. To the right are a few examples, click on it to get a better view.

The trick is going to be that I, or anyone actually, could make a quick pencil drawing of something that we want to be a graphic. All we have to do is scan it, run "live trace" and boom. It's a graphic that can be any resized, reshaped and quickly colored to a hundred different color schemes. It is so cool, it's unbelievable.