Adobe® Illustrator® 10 Classroom in a Book®

Exploring on your own

Using variables, you can update text, graph data, linked files, or graphics dynamically and change them in your artwork. For example, you can create a series of business cards in which individual names and titles change, but all other information remains constant.

The Variables feature lets designers create highly formatted graphics as templates (called data-driven graphics), and then collaborate with developers to control the links between a template and its content. For more complex applications, you could, for example, produce 500 different Web banners based on the same template. In the past, you had to manually fill in the template with data (images, text, and so on). With data-driven graphics, you can use a script referencing ...