Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator is a graphics designing program which was developed by Adobe Inc. With Creative Cloud (Adobe’s transition to a monthly or annual subscription service provided over the Internet), Illustrator CC was released. The latest version, Illustrator 2024, was released on October 10, 2023, and is the 28th generation in the product line. Adobe Illustrator was reviewed by HP Magazine as the best vector graphics editing program in 2021.

History of Adobe Illustrator

Versions 1–1.6 (Illustrator 88)

Development of Adobe Illustrator for Apple Macintosh began as Adobe’s second software product after PostScript in 1985 (shipping in January 1987). Adobe co-founder and CEO John Warnock developed Adobe Illustrator in late 1986 to automate many of the manual tasks used by his wife Marva. It used lines and Bezier turns to offer unlimited scalable graphics. Illustrator was released in early 1987, and became a commercialization of Adobe’s in-house font development software and postscript file format.

Adobe Illustrator is a companion product of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is primarily geared towards digital photo manipulation and image style of computer reflection, while Adobe Illustrator provides results in the typesetting and logographic areas of design. Early magazine ads (featured in communication arts such as graphic design trade magazines) referred to the product as “Adobe Illustrator”. The product name for version 1.7, Illustrator 88, was released in 1988 and introduced many new tools and features.

In 1989 Byte named Illustrator 88 among the “distinguished” winners of the Byte Awards, saying that with its Adobe has “overtaken” industry-dominant competitor Aldes Freehand.

Early versions of the software did not support working in preview mode and users were required to open two windows on their desktop to preview their work live. One window will show the ongoing work and the other window will show a preview of the ongoing work.

Versions 2–6

Although during its first decade Adobe developed Adobe Illustrator primarily for Macintosh, it intermittently supported other platforms. In the early 1990s, Adobe released versions of Illustrator for Display PostScript licensed NEXT, digital equipment corporation Altrax, Silicon Graphics IRIX, and Sun Solaris platforms, but they were discontinued due to poor market acceptance. The first version of Illustrator for Windows, version 2.0, was released in early 1989 and flopped.

The next Windows version, version 4.0, was widely criticized because it’s very similar to Illustrator 1.1 rather than Macintosh 3.0 version, and certainly not the equivalent of Windows’ most popular image package Corel Draw. (There was no version 2.0 or 4.0 for Macintosh — though, the second release title for mac was Illustrator 88 — the year of its release.) And there was no version 6 for Windows. However, version 4 was the first version of Ulster to support editing in preview mode, which did not appear in the Macintosh version until 5.0 in 1993. Version 6 was the last real Macintosh version of Ulster.

Versions 7–10

With the introduction of Illustrator 7 in 1997, Adobe made significant changes to the user interface with respect to path editing (and to combine on a user interface similar to Adobe Photoshop), and many users chose not to upgrade. The illustrator also began to support TrueType, effectively eliminating the “font wars” between PostScript Type 1 and TrueType. Like Photoshop, Illustrator also started supporting plugins, greatly and quickly enhancing its capabilities.

With a real user interface equalizer between macintosh and Windows versions starting at 7.0, designers can eventually become standard on Illustrator. Coral ported coral draw freehand that is still not available in Illustrator (high scaling percentage, advanced search and replace feature, selective round corner editing, exporting/printing only selected items, etc.). Famously, Aldes created a matrix comparing his freehand to Illustrator and Draw in which one “win” of the draw was that it came with three different clip art views of the human pancreas.

Adobe bought Alds for PageMaker in 1994. As a result, Macromedia received a freehand from its original developer, Altsus, in 1995, and continued its development until 2004.

The difference in power between Photoshop and Illustrator became apparent with the rise of the Internet, with Illustrator being expanded to support web publishing, rasterization previewing, PDF, and SVG (scalable vector graphics). Adobe was the initial developer of SVG for the web and Illustrator exported SVG files through the SVG file format plugin. Using Adobe SVG Viewer (ASV), introduced in 2000, users were allowed to view SVG images in most major browsers until it was discontinued in 2009. Local support for SVG was not complete in all major browsers until Internet Explorer 9 in 2011.

Illustrator version 9 included a tracing feature, as in Adobe’s closed product streamline.

The Illustrator version was released by Adobe on November 10, 2001.

Version CS-CS6

The Illustrator CS (also called Version 11), released by Adobe for Macs and Windows in October 2003, was the first version to include 3-dimensional capabilities that allow users to pull out or rotate shapes to create simple 3D objects.

The Illustrator CS2 (version 12), released by Adobe in April 2005, was available for both Mac OS X and the Microsoft Windows operating system. This was the last version for the Mac that didn’t run locally on Intel processors. New features included in the Illustrator CS2 include Live Trace, Live Paint, a control palette, and custom workspace. Live Trace allows bitmap imagery to be converted into vector art and improves previous tracing capabilities. Live Paint allows users greater flexibility in coloring objects, especially those that overlap.

In the same year of the cs2’s launch, Adobe Systems announced a deal to acquire Macromedia in a stock swap worth about $3.4 billion and merged the companies’ operations, networks, and customer care organizations shortly thereafter. Adobe now owns Freehand with the entire Macromedia product line and in 2007, Adobe announced that it would stop developing and updating the Freehand program. Instead, Adobe will provide tools and support to facilitate the transition to the illustrator.

The Alter CS3 includes interface updates to the control bar, the ability to sort individual points, multiple crop areas, color guide panels, and live color features. The CS3 was released on March 27, 2007.

CS4 was released in October 2008. This includes a variety of improvements to the old tools with the introduction of some brand-new tools derived from Freehand. The ability to create multiple art boards is one of the main additions to CS4 from freehand. Artboards allow you to create multiple versions of a piece of work within the same document. Other tools include Bulb Brush, which allows multiple overlapping vector brush strokes to be easily integrated or incorporated, and a new gradient tool that allows for more in-depth color manipulation as well as transparency in gradients.

CS5 was released in April 2010. With numerous additions to existing functionality, new features of the Illustrator CS5 include a view grid tool taken from freehand, a Bristol brush (for more natural and painterly-looking strokes) and a comprehensive update for strokes, which Adobe calls a “beautiful stroke.”

In 2011 the Adobe Illustrator team developed a vector drawing app for the iPad and iPhone, called Adobe Ideas. The app had many adobe illustrator features, yet it was a free download. This allowed professionals to create and visualize “on the go” and allowed anyone to access world-class vector drawing capabilities. As a result, Facebook and social media posts emerged from around the world, including vector drawings of Adobe Ideas.

Adobe added many more features and several bug fixes such as a new user interface, layer panels, RGB code, and color ramps to enhance performance.

Version CC

With Creative Cloud (the result of a change on Adobe’s release strategy), ulster CC was released. This version (17th) was the first version to be sold only in a subscription-based service model, consistent with another software previously called Creative Suite. As part of Creative Cloud, this version improved the topic such as syncing colors, fonts, and program settings, saving documents to the cloud, and integration with Behens (a creative collaboration network), as well as other features such as a new touch compatible type tool, images in the brush, CSS extraction, and the packaging of files.

Branding of Adobe Illustrator

Starting with version 1.0, Adobe chose to license Sandro Botticelli’s “Birth of Venus” image from the Batman Archive and used the part containing the Venice face as a branding image of Illustrator. John Warnock wanted a Renaissance image to present postscript as a new renaissance in publication, and Adobe employee Loan Seymour Cohen, who was responsible for early marketing materials, found Venus’s flowing hair to be an excellent means to demonstrate Illustrator’s power in detecting smooth turns on bitmap source images. Over the years, presenting this image on Adobe Illustrator‘s splash screen and packaging became more stylized to reflect the features included in each version.

The image of Venus (although still accessible via the Easter egg) was replaced with a stylized flower in illustrator CS (11.0) and CS2 (12.0) to suit the image of the nature of the creative suite. In CS3, Adobe once again changed the suite branding to simple color blocks with a two-letter acronym, matching a periodic table of elements.

The Adobe Illustrator was represented by the letters AI in white compared to the orange background (until version 4.0 the illustrator branding had orange and yellow prominent color schemes). The CS4 icon is almost identical, except for a slight change in font and color that is dark gray. The CS5 icon is also practically identical, except that this time the logo is like a box, with all other CS5 product logos, with the “AI” bright yellow. CS6 transformed it into a brown square with a yellow border and yellow characters, and in CC 2014 the colors were upgraded to sharp accents and thin borders.

Compatibility of Adobe Illustrator

Compatibility with Inkscape: The local form of Inkscape is SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics), which is supported by Adobe Illustrator, but the two implementations are not fully compatible. Inkscape also exports PS, EPS, and PDF formats that Illustrator can recognize.

Tools of Adobe Illustrator

A sidebar that appears on the left side of the screen with different tools for selecting, creating, and manipulating objects or artwork in the Adobe Illustrator. These tools can be selected as follows: drawing, typing, painting, reshaping, cutting and cutting, symbolizing, motion and zooming, and graph. A small triangle has the option to see or spread some hidden tools by pressing the mouse button on the triangle.

Some examples of basic tools in the illustrator are selection tools, paintbrush tools, pen tools, pencil tools such as selection tools used to organize artwork by correctly selecting, positioning, and stacking objects. In addition, selection tools can group, lock, or hide objects, and measure them. Paintbrush tools can be used to change the appearance of artwork. There are different types of brushes: calligraphy, scattering, art, specimen, and bristle. Pen tools create straight and curved lines for artwork and they can add anchor points to paths and delete them from paths.

File Formats of Adobe Illustrator

The Adobe Illustrator artwork format is the local Illustrator file format.

This is a proprietary file format developed by Adobe Systems to represent single page vector-based drawings in EPS or PDF formats.

The AI file format was originally a local format called PGF. PDF compatibility is achieved by adding a full copy of the PGF data to the saved PDF format file. This format is not related to .pgf using the same name progressive graphics format.

A more recent version of Adobe Illustrator uses the same “double-way” approach as PGF when saving EPS-compatible files. Early versions of the AI file format are real EPS files with a limited, compact syntax, with additional semantics represented by illustrator-specific DSC comments that conform to DSC’s open structuring conventions. These files match their respective Illustrator EPS counterparts, but EPS presets (procedure sets) are deleted from the file and instead referred externally using %% included instructions.

The following formats are also supported:

SVG Format

AutoCAD File Formats – Drawing by the Open Design Alliance implemented by SDK (previously Tega Drawing).

• AutoCAD Drawing (.dwg)
• AutoCAD Interchange File (.dxf)

Adobe Illustrator Draw

Adobe Illustrator Draw was a free form vector drawing app for Android and iOS users. With Adobe Illustrator, it’s currently marketed by Adobe via Creative Cloud. Drawings made with the Illustrator Draw app can be exported to Adobe Illustrator’s desktop programs.By 2022, the Illustrator draw has retired and has been replaced by Adobe Fresco.

Comparison Chart between Adobe Illustrator All Versions

See other article about Adobe other Platforms

• Adobe Photoshop