I finished up the Zoovolution project. It was so much fun and with the money I got from that one job I finally took the plunge and upgraded to Adobe CS4 Design Premium

I also picked up Corel X4 mainly because it works with the Securidesign plugin I have for creating guilloche patterns.

My wallet is a lot lighter now but I have a huge smile on my face.

I just started playing with this last night. It took forever for CS4 to install but that might mean I need to defrag. After getting it loaded I was struck how much faster applications load and how nice the updated interface is. The tabbed windows took me back a little but I think it’s an improvement. I played with Illustrator’s new blob brush. It will make freehand drawing in Illustrator a whole lot of fun. I also checked out the new gradient tool with interactive sliders and transparency! Very,very cool. I love the new appearance pallet feature where you can turn on and off visibility of effects. It was a long time coming for Illustrator and boy is it nice.

Photoshop Extended is going to be a real treat for me. Having the animation and 3D tools built in is going to be a lot of fun.

I can’t wait till the Christmas break to sit down and make something cool with it. I want to upgrade Camtasia Studio too so I can make a few tutorials later. My old version broke when I upgraded to Vista .

Whew! What can I say. I’m in art heaven now!