Each brush type has it's own properties, so you can fine-tune the final effect. If you aren't interested in making your own brushes, the Illustrator 8 application CD comes with a huge brush library from which you can choose. Making The Most Of Type Besides graphic tools, Illustrator also has a lot of text abilities, both creative and traditional. You have all the standard paragraph, column, leading, and kerning controls that are common to other layout programs like Quark or PageMaker. You also have the ability to turn on non-printing characters so you can edit large blocks of text more easily.
Illustrator also has no shortage of possible creative effects for text.
You can also fill a graphic with text or wrap text around a graphic. You can also convert your text into paths, which means you lose the ability to edit text but you can treat the text as a graphic. This is useful when you make more specialized graphic effects like metallic or fuzzy type for headlines and such. Besides traditional column-style layout, you can do a number of other effects such as applying text to paths. Getting A Firm Foundation Illustrator has many additional graphic and text capabilities.