Adobe Illustrator Review

Adobe Illustrator, along with Photoshop and InDesign, has dominated vector drawing software since its 1987 introduction.

Adobe is adding new features and improvements to its already superb product, keeping it as an Editors’ Choice winner.

Always Improving

The Puppet Warp tool, route simplification, and configurable anchor point size were all added in 2018. The iPad version of Illustrator arrived in 2019, and by 2020 it has received route simplification, performance improvements, in-app learning and support, cloud document access, smart glyph snapping and alignment, grid/radial/mirror repetition tools, canvas rotation, and support for Apple’s hot M1 Silicon.

Adobe keeps improving the program’s desktop and mobile compatibility. We heard about web-based Illustrator and Photoshop at Adobe Max 2021. New Creative Cloud Libraries make project materials accessible across all Creative Cloud applications, we learnt. See below for details on upcoming upgrades.

Illustrator’s iPad and desktop versions now offer Share for Commenting. It enables you email your work to anybody for inspection and discussion, even if they don’t have Illustrator.

Creative Cloud Spaces and Creative Cloud Canvas are the two new beta web-based collaboration tools announced for Fall 2021. Organize your team’s work, resources, and assets in Spaces. Clients and other stakeholders may use Canvas to explore and evaluate ideas and solutions.

Illustrator on iPad also received some love. You can now use your iPad’s camera to scan photographs and then process them using the new Vectorize tool.

Other iPad pleasures include creative and calligraphic brushes—create, use, and modify them. This, together with Photoshop and Fresco, adds to the creative experience.

Despite competition from Affinity Designer, CorelDraw, and Sketch, Illustrator remains the market-leading vector drawing program because to its unequaled toolset, broad features, and seamless connection with Creative Cloud Apps.

Illustrator Price

Adobe Illustrator requires a membership. It costs $20.99 per month if paid annually, or $31.49 if paid monthly. Illustrator isn’t available as a perpetual license, so you can’t buy it once and keep it. A subscription is required.

Adobe’s 20+ app suite costs $52.99 per month. Adobe Portfolio, Adobe Fonts, and Adobe Spark are all included. The app is free. For a 30-day free trial, no credit or debit card information is necessary.

What if I can’t run
Mac OS 10.15 Catalina and later, Windows (11, 10), iPad (iOS version 14 and later). You will need an internet connection to download and register the apps on any platform. You can work offline, however membership validation and certain online services need internet connectivity. Adobe’s website has a detailed list of system requirements for Adobe Illustrator.

New Adobe Illustrator Features

With its annual Max conference, Adobe introduced a slew of new capabilities for its Creative Cloud design software package, including Illustrator. Along with new collaboration tools like Creative Cloud Canvas and Spaces, the program acquired some exciting new features of its own. Our favorites.

3D Enhancements and Substance Marriage (3D Creators’ Power)
Adobe Illustrator’s tired 3D effects have been revived with ray-tracing and a new UI. Notably, Adobe has included Substance, a recent acquisition. You may browse the Adobe Substance 3D assets website to find your favorite photo-realistic materials. (An extra membership is required to access all Substance 3D applications.) You may also use Adobe Capture, an underappreciated iOS app.

The new Discover panel in Illustrator makes it easy to find useful resources and information.

If you click the home symbol in Illustrator’s revamped app header, you’ll be taken to an experience similar to Home on the iPad.

Also, never underestimate the still-useful Help option on the main menu bar for quick queries or reminders where key utilities are hidden. Designers have complained about Illustrator’s steep learning curve. The app’s increasing library of lessons and show-me videos guides users through Illustrator’s vast capabilities.

Better Feedback Collection

Unlike great art, someone pays you to solve their problems efficiently and beautifully, and it’s vital to know what clients think of your work. That’s why it’s critical to be able to collaborate with your team and get input from stakeholders, clients, or your supervisor.

Now you may share for commenting with anybody you want. Even if they don’t have Illustrator, they may remark but not change your work. In the Share button, choose Save as a Cloud Document to save your file as a cloud document.

If you click the share icon again, you may invite colleagues to save, remark, and even modify (or not). Your coworkers get an email with a link to the cloud file. If you want, you may copy and paste the URL. Saving your project as a cloud document also gives you fast access on other devices like the iPad.

The fact that you can view the feedback and comments inside the app is key. Annotations may be pinned to particular places. You may react, resolve, or remove comments as you go.

I can’t wait to use my new skill in the workplace. The change from PDFs and sticky notes may annoy my customers, but I’ll spin it till they’re as delighted as I am.

Pixels describe raster-based artwork like that made in Photoshop. Rectangles, rectangles, and other raster images may be magnified or zoomed to see pixelation. Also, massive raster art creates huge files.

Adobe Illustrator is essential whether you work in logo design, typography, or illustration. Easy to use, it can create basic drawings, complicated maps, technical illustrations, iconography, information graphics, exquisite typography, even business card or invitation layouts. You may also export your files for usage in print, online, video, mobile interfaces, interactive projects, and app designs.

Tools

Illustrator’s interface (powerful toolbars and panels, contextual menus) should be familiar to InDesign or Photoshop users. The newly flattened interface may be customized from dark to light gray. Palettes and menus snap to your liking. When your screen is properly created with your preferred settings, defaults, menu structure, and placements, it’s nice to know you can store your workspace and return to it anytime you want.

I like that you may set custom key commands to the program to enhance your productivity for every assignment. Illustrator has specialized workspaces for layout, printing and proofing, typography, and online, as well as an Essentials area that showcases new features. The prior Essentials arrangement remains accessible.

Artboards are repositionable pages in Illustrator. You may resize them using Illustrator’s defaults, crop them using the Crop tool, or adjust their width and height manually. Artboard control has been enhanced, with better positioning and arranging, and a higher maximum board count.

POPUP APPEARANCE AND PROPER

The simple Appearance panel is the backbone and muscle of your workstation. The appearance panel in Illustrator is often overlooked, yet it is my information control tower. The Appearance panel allows you to control an object’s or group’s basic fills, stroke color and size, opacity, and blending mode. For example, making several strokes, modifying Illustrator effects (such as glows, feathering, and drop shadows), and reordering or toggling effects layers, the panel shines.

You may access the Properties panel in the Essentials workspace or through the Window menu. Its contextual menu provides commonly used tools based on the current context.

Toolbox
Adobe’s tools panel offers everything you’d expect in a professional drawing environment, plus some unusual treats. And if that isn’t enough, there are frequently updated, amazing plug-in bundles designed exclusively for Illustrator. XTream Path 2 by C.Valley and FILTERiT 5 by Astute Graphics are just a few examples.

Illustrator can execute custom scripts, if you really want to be a design geek. Or, you may look online for interesting automation and function-adding scripts.

Illustrator’s eight tool categories let you develop and stimulate discovery. I advise newbies to examine the tools and submenus before starting a project due tomorrow. Having so many specialized tools might be intimidating.

Illustrator comes with five basic selection tools for objects, groups, paths, and points. The Preferences menu gives you even more power. Custom size for anchor points and handles is a dream come true for hardworking eyes. It was terribly little till now, no matter how high you enlarged your vision.

The Object > Path > Simplify tool was included in the November 2019 release. This tool eliminates unneeded anchor points, which is particularly useful for pathways formed by tracing or using mobile applications. The tool maintains the route while it works, and the Reduce Anchor Point Slider allows you to reduce the number of anchor points. To go further, visit the Simplify dialog and set the Corner Point Angle Threshold.

The program’s 18 drawing tools will please. Pixel Perfect, for example, helps create clean online visuals with pixels aligned along a grid. The Puppet Warp tool allows you to make modest modifications without having to pick and move individual points. A triangulated mesh envelope surrounding your selection enables you to lock some zones while modifying neighboring regions, rather of having to do it point by point.

Illustrator’s six type tools, including the innovative Touch Type tool, make complicated typography a breeze. Individual letters inside live text blocks may be repositioned, rotated, and scaled. Now typographers may style a text block using OpenType styles.

Live Paint, for example, allows users to color fill objects just by clicking on them. This feature is even more wonderful when you understand that you can build unexpected forms by substituting polygon and ellipse strokes with a custom brush.

The wonderful Symbol Sprayer tool has seven versions. You can turn a symbol into paint, like a star, and the tool sprays stars. The Styler, Shifter, Scruncher, Screener, Sizer, Spinner, and Stain tools allow you to customize the spray density, unpredictability, color variation, size variation, and individual star spinning.

Illustrator aims high. Reshaping and transformation tools feel great as you tweak, pucker, and inflate your work in whatever manner you like. The Pathfinder tab gives you great control over lines and shapes with five slicing and cutting tools. Experiment with these functions.

Illustrator satisfies with nine graphing features that enable you to get down to work. Your data may be transformed into bar, pie, scatter, and radar graphs, among other graph kinds. What I’m curious in is whether someone comes up with scripts to help construct sophisticated graphs like tree maps, network diagrams, or bubble maps.

Hottest Work, Play, and Experiment Features
Drawing Precision Illustrator was designed for precise drawing. Perspective grids and axonometric angle limitations save time and stress when creating dimensional writing effects. It’s a great way to arrange and separate elements of your artwork for editing or varied overlays. Finally, the Pen tool is great for drawing gorgeous vector paths, Bezier curves, anchor points, and coaxing handles.

File Export and Copy and Paste. With so many possible asset destinations inside each project, providing the proper file format to colleagues and suppliers is critical. Of course, you can copy and paste from other Creative Cloud programs into Illustrator, or even drag. But I like that Illustrator can convert files for print, online, and mobile in formats including AutoCAD, BMP, CSS, JPEG, PDF, PNG, SVG, TIFF, and others.

Illustrator is a great tool for typographers, particularly now that Adobe has incorporated InDesign’s intuitive OpenType glyph chooser drop-down. Rather of assigning glyphs one by one, you may now apply alternatives to whole text blocks. Simply choose an alternative character from the drop-down menu. For the number 5, you may pick between superscript, subscript, tabular, old style, denominator, numerator, case sensitive, tiny capitals, and other options.

Illustrator also uses InDesign’s character and paragraph formatting settings. A Glyphs window and support for Asian (horizontal and vertical), Indic, Arabic and Hebrew languages make working with type in Illustrator a joy. Thankfully, the previously useless spellchecker has been improved.

Variable type is a clever extension of Adobe’s Multiple Master technology. Acumin, Minion, Myriad, Source code, Source Sans, and Source Serif are all preloaded in OpenType variable format. With changeable fonts, you may alter width (condensed or expanded), weight (thin to black), and slant with sliders in Illustrator. It’s like having 30 typefaces in one. The slant is an oblique, not a true italic.

Automation. Illustrator’s Graphic Styles are comparable to Photoshop’s. They’re one-click tools that apply characteristics to an object or type in one step. Simple drop shadows or a seven-layer stroke with offsets, feathering, and an interior glow are all possible with Illustrator. In Illustrator, shadows and glows are created by grading solid colors to imitate blur.

Select an item with a Graphic Style applied and look at the Appearance panel. You can examine each of the attribute layers that make up the Graphic Style. You may use one of the many Photoshop Action presets or create your own.

Instant asset availability is convenient. Creative Cloud Libraries users may access palettes, styles, and copy blocks from any software.

Libraries & Apps
Creative Cloud Libraries keep your project components from desktop and mobile applications together for simple sharing. Libraries also let you save frequently used text blocks like taglines or disclaimers.

It works with Fresco and Capture. This iOS app is great. Take a snapshot on the train to work and let Capture do its magic. Your train-made brush is currently in Creative Cloud Libraries and ready to use.

A simplified professional procedure benefits everybody. Creative Cloud makes teamwork and client cooperation simple with shared and private libraries.

Adobe Fonts (formerly Typekit) is Adobe’s extensive collection of font families for print and online. Just choose your typefaces and sync them (or grab code for your site). In this case, Illustrator does not replicate Adobe Fonts in the packed folder. Your printer or service bureau must also have Creative Cloud. Of course, if you don’t have a multipage document with plenty of text, you can just convert type to outline.

For example, Adobe Stock plans allow you to distribute Adobe Stock plans throughout your organization. You can also easily transfer licenses using a web-based admin panel. Plans for students, instructors, schools, and institutions are available.

Designs Wanted
No software is 100%. Some Adobe Illustrator aficionados wish for additional or improved capabilities. Here are some of my built-in feature requests (some of which are covered by the aforementioned plugins):
Numeric handle adjustments and symmetrical movement of more than two-point handles would be excellent.
With the rise of big data graphing, we’re seeing new and exciting methods to view data. But huge data necessitates big algorithms. So, I’d want a program that allows me to make creative graphs and data graphics, like circular packing charts and sunburst/radial column charts.
To make life easy, all three programs should share critical commands. Speaking about Photoshop, it would be amazing if Illustrator had a comparable history panel (as does Affinity Designer).

Victory
Adobe Illustrator is a must-have for every professional designer or artist. It can develop vector solutions to any problem. Delight in the application’s wide extension capabilities and make it into a customized digital dreamworld. Illustrator becomes an instinctive extension of your mind when you use it often and examine its many tools, menus, palettes, and choices. For vector graphics creation, Adobe Illustrator is the obvious Editors’ Choice.

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