If you thought that only Photoshop gets all the love from Adobe, think again. Today Adobe released a sneak peek of what's coming to Illustrator CS6.
The video features Brenda Sutherland, Illustrator Product Manager Extraordinaire, showing a new Pattern Creation feature. Anyone who has ever tried to design seamless pattern swatches with Illustrator knows that it can often be an exercise in frustration. But this new feature makes it really simple to not only create seamless patterns, but also to edit them.
Basically, pattern creation now happens within a kind of isolation mode (much like how you edit symbols for example). Within this "pattern creation mode" as it's called, you can work with your art and Illustrator automatically creates and previews the repeat. To modify existing patterns, you simply double-click on the swatch (what a concept!) and it brings you into the isolation mode where you can either modify the pattern, or make a change and save off a duplicate. It's easy and it's fun!
You can watch Brenda demo the feature here.
One other thing which you'll notice in the video -- Adobe Illustrator CS6 features a dark user interface, similar to what you may have seen in the Photoshop CS6 beta. Just as with Photoshop, this user interface can be lightened and darkened to your preference.