Road to MAX: 10 highly requested features for Illustrator and InDesign to boost your productivity

Our global community has always been instrumental in helping us build our professional design tools. After all, your feedback helps us shape the ongoing innovation in both Illustrator and InDesign, by either bringing in new features or improving existing ones to optimize creative workflows, expressiveness, power and precision so you have more time to focus on the work you love.

Finding ways to optimize your workflows is a continuing journey, and some of our new features are much loved instantly while others need further fine-tuning. And that’s where you come in: Your feedback is essential as we develop Illustrator and InDesign to evolve as your workflows evolve. We’re listening — our product, design, and engineering teams are addressing your highly-requested feature improvements.

The road to MAX: Optimize your workflow with these 10 user-driven features

Adobe MAX is just a few short weeks away, and we’re looking forward to meeting many of you in-person in Miami Beach or having you join us online in October. As we prepare for Adobe MAX, we’re excited to highlight 10 Illustrator and InDesign productivity-related features that were driven directly from your feedback.

We’ll be highlighting them on the @AdobeDesign Instagram channel one-by-one over the next 10 days, but you’re getting an early preview in this blog. Find out about features you can already use in the app today, and get a sneak preview of those we’ll release at MAX.

Also, if you don’t see one of these features in Illustrator or InDesign, please make sure your application is updated by visiting the Creative Cloud app and checking for “Updates Available” (or click here for Illustrator).

Let’s get started!

#1 Measure and plot dimensions in Illustrator in a few clicks (available now)

The Dimension tool came to life after we received feedback from so many of you that it was too time consuming to manually add dimensions to your work. And every time dimensions changed, you had to repeat this manual process yet again. Examples of UserVoice asks included: “A tool to automatically dimension signs would be an advantage to those of us working in the sign industry who create visuals for clients” and “The Dimension tool needs to have live updates”.

Illustrator’s Dimension tool automatically measures and plots dimensions such as distances, angles, and radii in your artwork. This can be useful when you want to add dimensions to product packaging, fashion patterns, and interior designs, for example, or for handoff to clients or production.

After launching the Dimension tool a few months ago, we knew our job was not done. Since then, we’ve been listening to your feedback, and as a result of those conversations, incorporated additional improvements into the latest update, like adding custom scales, the ability to measure the distance between any two points, or having dimensions auto-update as you modify the artwork. And we will continue to improve it per your guidance, so check out the Dimension tool (you’ll find it in the left-side toolbar) and let us know what you think.

#2 Manage document changes with ease with InDesign’s new History Panel (available now)

With complex documents, a designer’s project will usually go through multiple time-consuming iterations. For example, you create a page layout for a retail magazine that’s planned to have a number of products, but during the design process, some of the products become backordered and need to be removed from the layout.

But — wait! Right as the files are sent to preflight, the products are suddenly back in inventory and you need to include them after all. That’s all time-consuming work that you’d rather not have to do, which is why we received over 360 votes in InDesign’s UserVoice to “Please add a history panel to InDesign, like Photoshop's”.

Thanks to your votes, the History Panel in InDesign was born! You can browse the list of actions taken on any InDesign document in a session. You can then revert your document to a selected state, delete one, or create a new document from it. In the above example, rather than painstakingly having to redo the layout with each change, the designer can easily revert back to the state where the appropriate products are displayed.

#3 Precisely select objects with the new enclosed mode (available now)

You told us that as designers and illustrators, you need more precision when working with intricate and crowded artworks, especially detailed illustrations (and we agree!). A key ask was to be able to “Select ONLY the objects ENTIRELY inside the selection window marquee”. This is now possible with the new enclosed mode for marquee selection. Now you can select to have only fully enclosed objects be selected. The default marquee selection will continue to select objects that are partially included in the marquee.

To switch to the enclosed mode, just press E once as you drag the marquee. Thanks again for the great suggestion!

#4 Save time by drawing stars as live shapes in Illustrator (available now)

Our live shapes such as the rectangle, ellipse, and polygon tools in Illustrator have been popular with designers. We heard that creating and editing stars was time-consuming to adjust manually, which is why we brought the Star tool to Illustrator.

Because the star is now a live shape, you have the flexibility to dynamically configure your star the way you like in just a few clicks, easily making adjustments via the on-screen controls or the transform panel. As a result, you’ll save a significant amount of time that you’d otherwise spend on manually adjusting the shape.

#5 Export Illustrator files as PDFs in seconds (available now)

Many of you told us that Illustrator needed the ability to export as PDF since saving a PDF in Illustrator was an arduous multistep process. Our teams worked together to address your key pain points and delivered an export PDF function that is already getting positive feedback.

You can now export your Illustrator files in PDF format with just a click of a button. The exported PDF is optimized for shareability and reduced file size. Changes you or a client make to the PDF are compatible when you bring the file back to Illustrator. Select ‘export as’ from the file menu and choose the PDF format from the dropdown.

#6 Extend images with Generative Expand in InDesign (available now)

This summer, we introduced Generative Expand in beta to help designers handle one of the most common frustrations in layout work — images that don’t quite fit. Whether it's because of frame size, bleeds, or margins, adjusting images can be time-consuming. Generative Expand, powered by Adobe Firefly, was created to solve this problem by seamlessly expanding images in InDesign to fit any layout. We heard from designers like you that we needed to bring further improvements in the Generative Expand feature in Adobe InDesign.

Continuously enhancing InDesign for smoother workflows and greater creative control, in close collaboration with our users, is our primary goal so continue providing suggestions and votes in our UserVoice or in our community.

Disclaimer: Generative Expand is currently available wherever Adobe provides services, and designed to be safe for commercial use. It’s not available for users in China mainland.

Time for the drumroll — the next 4 highlighted productivity features are all coming soon at MAX and we’re giving you a sneak. So read on and make sure to update your Illustrator and InDesign apps on October 14 to see them in action.

#7 Resize artwork with Artboard in Illustrator (coming soon at MAX)

Designers working in Illustrator organize their projects in artboards on the canvas and resize their projects based on their client’s needs, especially for branding and marketing projects (i.e. an icon needs to be bigger). Each project typically has many assets on an artboard, and resizing each piece within an artboard is a time-consuming, manual process — and you told us please bring “a feature to scale a whole artboard with its content.”

Based on your feedback, we went back to our own artboard and thought this through. Now you can choose if the artwork within your artboard scales automatically as you resize your artboard. Select the artboard tool, then choose ‘scale art with artboard’ in the properties / control panel.

#8 Support for MathML in InDesign (coming soon at MAX)

Many of you publishing technical documents, books, and manuals told us that InDesign needed MathML support. Typesetting, inputting, and maintaining math formulas for the layout and publishing of technical documents, books, and manuals, which have math expressions as part of the content, requires a lot of time and effort. Baselines must be manually manipulated, and adjustments can be tedious.

We heard you and worked to get the first version of MathML support into InDesign. Now you can ingest MathML as an SVG and update the expression from within InDesign. Expression styles can be modified by adjusting the font size and color to match rest of the document design.

#9 Quickly create gradients in Illustrator (coming soon at MAX)

You’ve told us that you want to create gradients to add depth to your illustrations, brand graphics, and marketing or advertising designs. Right now, this requires using the gradient slider and manually choosing colors, which takes a lot of time, especially if you only want to get a gradient for two colors.

But, we’ve been working hard on improving this, knowing it’s a priority for you, and now you can create gradients directly from your selected colors in Illustrator’s swatch panel. Just drag and drop them onto the gradient panel or click ‘create gradient’ option in the swatch menu. Fun fact: It’s the first-ever tool that can sense gradients in your work!

#10 Open and edit InDesign files in Adobe Express (coming soon at MAX)

You want to minimize the number of templates you need to create for other teams (who doesn’t?!). In an ideal world, you’d make one standard template that can be edited for content (i.e., if the marketing or sales teams need to make minor changes like dates, pricing, or the location) without affecting the original template. You told us this — over and over and over. And our team’s ears were burning — now you can do this (!!) with a seamless Adobe Express integration for InDesign.

It’s really easy: Export and open an InDesign document directly in Adobe Express, then edit the content or lock elements within Adobe Express ensuring brand consistency and guidelines before sharing the document with other Adobe Express users.

Try out features 1-6 in the latest release of Illustrator or InDesign, join us at Adobe MAX to find out more about features 7-10 which are going live at the event, and stay tuned for more announcements at Adobe MAX!

Always on tap: Making continuous performance enhancements

Let’s get under the hood for a bit. One key area we’re relentlessly focusing on is improving the performance and responsiveness of computationally intensive tasks. Those are tasks that you may not realize require a significant amount of computing power and resources to process, like placing multiple images, embedding linked images, or opening documents with many linked images.

Yet these tasks are frequently performed throughout the day and can occasionally lead to slower response times while you’re working. No one likes to wait, which is why we’re bringing multithreading capabilities to Illustrator. Multithreading will allow Illustrator to perform multiple tasks concurrently to improve efficiency and responsiveness, enhancing the performance of these tasks aka less wait for you.

But it’s a complex process, and you may initially notice more impact in some areas vs others as we fully implement improvements across the application. Some of our progress so far includes periodic document backups, snapping guide generation, thumbnail generation for layers with much more coming soon.

Let us know what you think — multithreading improvements are available to try right now in Illustrator’s Beta build (note that your computer needs to have a multi-core processor to fully take advantage of multithreading). The Beta app is accessible through the Creative Cloud Desktop App:

1. Open the Creative Cloud Desktop App
2. Navigate to the "Beta apps" section
3. Look for the Illustrator Beta and download it to experience these performance enhancements firsthand

Building the future of Illustrator and InDesign, together

We truly value this as a genuine, two-way dialogue. These 10 features (and so many more we’ve been releasing based on your feedback) are just the tip of the iceberg: Our engineers are also busy addressing many other key user requests to improve everyday tasks.

A huge thank you for helping us build the future of our professional design tools! We’re on this journey together and it wouldn’t be possible without your continued input. Experiment with these features or any other in your toolkit and let us know about workflow challenges or enhancement ideas so we can address them to help you achieve optimal productivity.

Have feedback on our apps? We’d love to hear from you. You can tag #AdobeIllustrator or #AdobeInDesign in your social post or add ideas at illustrator.uservoice.com (for Illustrator) or indesign.uservoice.com (for InDesign).