Adobe Illustrator has reigned over vector drawing applications since its release in 1987, quickly becoming a key member of Adobe’s trifecta of industry-standard graphic design and illustration tools, alongside Photoshop and InDesign. Adobe continues to introduce new features and enhancements sure to delight creatives to the already-excellent software, helping to maintain its standing as an Editors’ Choice winner.
Constantly Improving
Top additions in 2018 included path simplification, an improved Properties panel, the Puppet Warp tool, and custom sizing for anchor points. 2019 brought Illustrator to the iPad, and by 2020, the app’s feature repository had gained path simplification, speed enhancements, in-app learning and support, cut-and-copy Artboards, Cloud Document access, smart glyph snapping and alignment tools, oft-requested grid/radial/mirror repeat tools, canvas rotation, and support for Apple’s sizzling M1 Silicon.
Adobe continues to improve and add new interoperability between the program’s desktop and mobile siblings. At Adobe Max 2021, we learned that web-based versions of Illustrator and Photoshop are coming soon. We also learned about the addition of Creative Cloud Libraries, which keep project assets at your fingertips across all Creative Cloud apps. For more on the forthcoming improvements, see below.
If that weren’t enough, Illustrator’s iPad and desktop versions now support the Share for Commenting feature. It lets you send anyone a web link to your work for their review and comment, even folks who don’t have Illustrator installed.
Topping the announcements for Fall 2021 is a beta duo of web-based collaboration facilitators: Creative Cloud Spaces and Creative Cloud Canvas. Think of Spaces as a centralized hub where your team can share work, resources, and assets. Canvas is like a real-time mood board for clients and other stakeholders to explore and evaluate concepts and solutions.
Illustrator on the iPad also got some capability kisses. Now you can trace images using your iPad’s camera as a scanner, then process it with the new Vectorize tool which draws your sketch automatically.
Other goodies for the iPad include much-anticipated artistic and calligraphic brushes—make them, use them, and edit them. The addition of object blending, rulers and guides, version history, and cut-and-paste capabilities, between it and Photoshop and Fresco, truly amp up the creative experience.
Despite some competition in the vector-based graphics space—Affinity Designer, CorelDraw, and Sketch, to name a few—Illustrator remains the market-leading vector drawing software thanks to its unrivaled toolset, sweeping capabilities, and integration with Creative Cloud Apps, the industry standards.
How Much Does Illustrator Cost?
Adobe Illustrator is only available via subscription. It costs $20.99 per month with an annual commitment or $31.49 on a month-to-month basis. Adobe does not offer a perpetual license version of Illustrator, so you can’t pay once and own it forever. You can only get it with a subscription.
The full Adobe suite of 20-plus apps costs $52.99 per month. It includes 100GB of cloud storage, Adobe Portfolio, Adobe Fonts, and Adobe Spark. The related Fresco drawing app is free. A free 30-day trial lets you test the software out with no commitment and no credit or debit card information required.
Can I Run Illustrator?
Illustrator is compatible with Windows (Windows 11, Windows 10 21H1, 20H2, 1909, and 2004), macOS (10.15 Catalina and later), and iPad (iOS version 14 and later). No matter which platform you use, you need a reliable internet connection to download and register the programs. You can work offline, but you need an internet connection for membership validation and access to some online services. You can find a complete list of the system requirements for Adobe Illustrator on Adobe’s site.
Top New Features in Adobe Illustrator
At its annual Max conference, online-only this year, Adobe announced a raft of new features for its Creative Cloud design software suite, and Illustrator was not to be overlooked. In addition to partaking of new collaboration features like Creative Cloud Canvas and Spaces, the software got some compelling new capabilities all its own. Here are our favorites.
3D Enhancements and Marriage to Substances (3D Creators’ Superpower)
Illustrator’s sleepy 3D-like effects have been resuscitated with a ray-tracing engine and an expanded new interface. Notably, Adobe has integrated materials from its recently acquired company, Substance. On the Adobe Substance 3D assets page, you can see multitudinous photo-realistic materials, then import your favorites. (Full access to the Substance 3D quartet of apps requires an additional subscription.) You can also use the underutilized iOS app, Adobe Capture, to create your own.
Softening the Storied Learning Curve
Learning Illustrator just got easier with the new in-app Discover panel that directs you to helpful resources and information.
Alternatively, click on the house icon in Illustrator’s redesigned app header, you’re transported to an interface that feels much like Home on Illustrator on the iPad.
Additionally, for quick questions or reminders where certain tools are buried, never underestimate the still-useful Help tab that lives on the main menu bar. Adobe seems to have listened to user feedback about Illustrator’s learning curve. The app’s ever-growing collection of tutorials and quick show-me videos helps users work through and learn Illustrator’s superabundant capabilities.
A Better Way to Collect Feedback
Graphic design differs from fine art in many ways, the most fundamental being that someone is paying you to solve their challenges effectively and elegantly, and it’s critical to know what customers will think of your work. That’s why it’s important to be able to share files for collaboration with your team (if you work with one) and then solicit feedback from your stakeholders, clients, or boss.
Illustrator’s new Share for Commenting feature brings you closer than ever to anyone you choose. Even if they don’t have Illustrator, they can comment on your work as a guest, but not make edits. Simply click on the Share button and up pops the dialog box encouraging you to save your file as a cloud document.
By clicking Continue, the deed is done, and if you click the share button once again, you have the option to invite teammates to save, comment, and even edit (or not). Your teammates receive an email with a link to the cloud document. If you prefer, you can copy the link and send it however you want. Incidentally, saving your file as cloud documents also affords you instant access to it on other devices, such as the iPad.
What really makes this feature work is that you can see the feedback and comments from within the app. Annotations can be pinned to specific areas, so everything is clear. As you review comments, you can reply, resolve, or delete them.
I can’t wait to try this new capability in real work situations. I do worry that my clients who are used to PDFs and stickies might resist this progress, but I’ll spin it until they are as excited as I am.
Vector vs. Raster
To understand Adobe Illustrator, it helps to know the difference between vector and raster graphics. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief explanation.
Vector graphics are defined by points, lines, and Boolean curves. Their main advantage over raster images is that you can enlarge them infinitely without loss of resolution. For example, if you were designing a huge billboard or other large graphics where scalability is a requisite for success, you would need vector graphics. A second advantage of designing with vectors is that files tend to be much smaller than their raster counterparts.
Conversely, raster-based artwork like that created in Photoshop is defined by pixels. When you enlarge or zoom in on raster art, the pixels enlarge too, resulting in visible pixelation, or chunkiness with ragged edges. Also, large raster artwork produces enormous files.When your work includes logo design, typography, or illustration, Adobe Illustrator is a must in your arsenal. It’s the tool for creating simple drawings, maps, complex technical illustrations, iconography, interesting charts and diagrams, information graphics, fine typography, and even business card or invitation layouts and mechanical art. What’s more, you can export your files in a variety of formats intended for use in print, web, video, mobile interfaces, interactive projects, and app designs.
Workspace and Tools
If you’ve worked with InDesign or Photoshop, Illustrator’s environment (robust toolbars and panels, and contextual menus) should be reasonably familiar. You can customize the recently modernized, flattened interface with options from dark to light gray. Palettes and menus snap to any configuration that pleases you. When you have your screen perfectly composed with your favorite preferences, defaults, menu organization, and positions, it’s good to know that you can save your workspace and later clean up palette clutter by returning to that exact configuration whenever you like.
I appreciate that the software lets you assign custom key commands, which allows you to further optimize your workflow for any kind of project. In fact, Illustrator ships with customized workspace options specifically suited to disciplines such as layout, printing and proofing, typography and web, and an Essentials space that highlights new enhancements and additions. Fear not, you can still access the previous Essentials setup.
Illustrator supports multiple, repositionable pages, called Artboards. You can size them using Illustrator’s myriad presets, cut them down to size with the Crop tool, or define the width and height values yourself. Artboard control has improved, with enhancements to positioning and arranging, as well as an increase in the maximum number of boards allowed.
Appearance and Properties Panels
Although it’s mixed in with other less powerful tools, the unassuming Appearance panel constitutes the backbone and muscle of your workspace. Appearance is arguably the most underappreciated of Illustrator’s default panels, but I consider this tool my information control tower. With the Appearance panel, you have full command over every aspect of an object’s or group’s attributes including basic fills, stroke color and size, opacity, and blending mode. The panel really impresses when you work with complex operations like creating multiple strokes, adjusting Illustrator Effects (such as glows, feathers, and drop shadows), and reordering or toggling effects layers.
The Properties panel appears in the Essentials workspace and when you choose Properties from the Window menu. Its contextual menu shows frequently needed tools based on the current context, changing what it displays depending on what you select.
Toolset Panel
In addition to the Appearance panel, Adobe has stocked the tools panel with everything you’d expect in a professional drawing application, plus some unique goodies. If that isn’t enough, there are some extraordinary, high-quality plug-in packages built specifically for Illustrator, and they’re updated regularly. Check out Astute Graphics’ jaw-dropping lineup or C.Valley’s versatile sets FILTERiT 5 and XTream Path 2.
If you really want to get your design geek on, know that Illustrator can run custom scripts. You can use the ones installed with the program, code some yourself (in Microsoft Visual Basic, AppleScript, JavaScript, and ExtendScript), or you can scout around online and find plenty of intriguing automation and function-adding scripts.
Illustrator’s eight tool categories allow you to get your design work done, and they inspire exploration, too. I recommend beginners do just that—explore the tools and their submenus before embarking on a project that’s due tomorrow. Having so many specialty tools can be daunting at first glance.
By default, Illustrator shows five selection tools, each designed to choose specific types of objects, groups, paths, and points. You can get even more precise control via the Preferences menu. A dream come true for hard-working eyeballs is the preferences addition of custom sizing for anchor points and handles. Until now, no matter how high you magnified your view, the anchor points remained painfully small.
A related feature that arrived in the November 2019 update is the Object > Path > Simplify tool. This tool removes unnecessary anchor points, which is especially important for paths created by tracing or with mobile apps. The tool keeps the path essentially the same as it does its job, and you can adjust the number of anchor points with the Reduce Anchor Point Slider. Getting even further into the weeds, you can open the Simplify dialog to specify the Corner Point Angle Threshold.
The program’s 18 drawing tools are sure to satisfy. Among them is the invaluable Pixel Perfect tool which aids in creating crisp web-destined graphics with pixels that align along a grid. The Puppet Warp tool gives you a way to make minor adjustments without having to select many points and move each one separately. The tool allows for more holistic complex-shape editing by creating a triangulated mesh envelope around your selection that allows you to lock certain zones while manipulating adjacent areas, rather than having to do so point by point.
Working with complex typography is a pleasure in Illustrator with six type tools, including the revolutionary Touch Type tool. Touch Type allows repositioning, rotation, and scaling of individual letters within live text blocks. Now typographers can assign OpenType alternate styles to a text block.
Artists will enjoy playing with eight paint tools, including the Live Paint tool, which lets users color fill shapes simply by clicking in them. The Brush tool allows you to create custom brushes (Pattern, Art, Scatter, Calligraphic or Bristle), a feature that becomes even more awesome when you realize that you can create unexpected shapes by replacing polygon and ellipse strokes with a custom brush.
Related to the paint tools is the delightful Symbol Sprayer tool with its seven variants. You can assign a symbol you created—let’s use a star for this example—to become the paint, and the tool sprays stars. With the Sprayer’s sub-tools you can control the density of spray, randomness, color variation, size variation, and individual rotation of the stars with the aptly named Styler, Shifter, Scruncher, Screener, Sizer, Spinner, and Stain tools.
Illustrator promises power. The reshaping and transformation tools feel quite satisfying as you manipulate your work in every way imaginable, like shape blending, morphing, warping, twisting, shearing, tweaking, puckering, and bloating. With five slicing and cutting tools, you get ultrafine control over lines and shapes with the Pathfinder tab, which performs operations like unite, exclude, intersect, merge, and divide. Try experimenting with these different functions.
Considering the popularity of data visualization and information graphics, Illustrator satisfies with nine graphing tools that allow you to get down to business. You can transform your data with an adequate variety of graph types, including bar and pie charts, but also scatter and radar charts. I’m eager to see if anyone comes up with scripts to help create unconventional graphs like tree maps, network diagrams, or bubble maps, which are more adept at displaying complex data.
Hottest Features for Work, Fun, and Experimentation
Precision Drawing. Illustrator was born for precision drawing more than for its other abilities. Amenities like perspective grids scaffold the foundation of perspective drawing and create dimensional lettering effects, while axonometric angle constraints save time and minimize frustration. Layers help organize and isolate components of your illustration for easy access when making edits or for variable overlays. Finally, although it takes a bit of practice to master, the Pen tool is your go-to for creating beautiful vector paths, Bezier curves, defining anchor points, and coaxing handles.
Copy and Paste and File Export. With so many potential asset destinations within each project, you only get the best final product if you supply the optimum file type to your colleagues and vendors. Of course, with other Creative Cloud apps on your desktop, you can copy and paste into and out of Illustrator, or even drag. But I enjoy being able to trust Illustrator’s wide range of file type conversions which include export for print, web, and mobile in formats such as AutoCAD, BMP, CSS, JPEG, PDF, PNG, SVG, TIFF, and more.
Type Wrangling. As a typographer, I find a lot to love when working with type in Illustrator, especially now that Adobe has integrated InDesign’s easy OpenType glyph chooser drop-down. You can now assign alternates to entire text blocks rather than having to assign glyphs one character at a time. All you do is highlight a character and select from the alternates options drop-down menu. For example, if you highlight the numeral 5 (depending on the typeface), you can choose from superscript, subscript, tabular, old style, denominator, numerator, case sensitive, small caps, and other alternates.
Illustrator also borrows from InDesign’s professional character and paragraph formatting options. The addition of Touch Type tool, described previously, a Glyphs window and support for Asian (horizontal and vertical), Indic, Arabic, and Hebrew languages makes working with type in Illustrator a stellar experience. Thankfully, the formerly anemic spellchecker has been revamped so that it’s now actually helpful.
Variable type resembles a smart build-out of Adobe’s Multiple Master technology of yore. Six typefaces in the OpenType variable format come preinstalled: Acumin, Minion, Myriad, Source code, Source Sans, and Source Serif. What’s great about variable fonts is that in Illustrator, you can precisely control width (condensed or extended), weight (thin to black) and slant with the software’s sliders. It’s like getting 30 fonts in one typeface. Something to note here is that the slant is an oblique, not a true italic.
Automation. Graphic Styles in Illustrator are akin to Photoshop’s Styles. They’re one-click mechanisms that automate the application of attributes to an object or type in a single step. In Illustrator, these attributes can be something as simple as a slight drop shadow or as complex as a seven-layer stroke with offsets, feathering and an inner glow. Note that in Illustrator, shadows and glows are made from stepped gradations of solid colors that simulate a blur.
A great way to understand building and using Graphic Styles is to select an object with a Graphic Style applied to it and examine the Appearance panel. There you will see each of the attribute layers that combine to generate the Graphic Style’s effect. To further automate your process, you can deploy a bounty of Photoshop-style Action presets or make your own.
In terms of convenience, automatically having assets wherever you need them is great. In Creative Cloud Libraries, users now have access to their palettes, styles, and even blocks of copy from whichever application they are using.
Libraries and Mobile Apps
Creative Cloud Libraries keep your project assets from desktop apps and mobile apps at your fingertips for easy integration between the apps. You also have the ability to keep handy often-used text blocks like taglines or disclaimers in your Libraries.
Integration with the iPad version and Adobe mobile app cousins, including Fresco and Capture, is a treat. The latter iOS app is surprisingly simple to use and worth a serious look. For instance, you can be on the train to work and create a custom brush on your iPhone by taking a snap of anything interesting and let Capture do its magic. Once you get to work and open Illustrator on your desktop, that brush you made on the train awaits in your Creative Cloud Library, ready to use in any project.
Everyone benefits from a streamlined professional process. With Creative Cloud, collaboration with team members and clients is easy with shared and private assets and libraries.
A subscription also includes Adobe Fonts (previously Typekit), Adobe’s well-populated library of typeface families for print and web use. Just choose your fonts and sync them to your desktop (or grab code for your site). The only drawback here is that when you collect for output, Illustrator does not copy Adobe Fonts in the packaged folder. Your printer or service bureau must have a Creative Cloud subscription too. Of course, if you don’t have a type-heavy, multipage document, you can go ahead and convert type to outline to get around the problem.
In addition to the goodies above, with Creative Cloud for Teams, your enterprise gets a team website, premium fonts, 100GB of cloud storage for collaboration, dedicated 24/7 technical support, shared Adobe Stock plans, streamlined management, the ability to reassign licenses (fantastic for dynamic staffing), a web-based admin console, consolidated billing, and purchase orders. There are also targeted plans for students, teachers, schools, and universities.
Design Wish List
No software is perfect. Even the beloved Adobe Illustrator has some fans hoping for a variety of new or enhanced features. Here are some of my wishes for built-in features (a few of which are met by the plugins mentioned above):
- Numeric handle adjustments would be a nice touch, along with the ability to symmetrically synchronize movement of more than two-point handles.
- With the popularity of graphing big data, we’re seeing new and interesting new ways to visualize information. But big data requires the big computing power of algorithms. At the least, I’d like a tool with more sophisticated options for making inventive graphs and data images, like chord diagrams, network (node-link) diagrams, circle packing graphs, tree charts, and sunburst/radial column graphs.
- Uniform key commands across Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator would make life easier. And speaking of Photoshop, it would be great if Illustrator had a similar history panel that allowed you to hop back to a certain state (as does Affinity Designer).
Vector Victor
Adobe Illustrator is essential for any serious designer or artist’s software collection. With it you can create vector solutions for any challenge. What’s more, by being curious and taking advantage of Illustrator’s generous expansion capability, you can turn the application into a personalized digital dreamworld. With steady use and inquisitive inspection, the multitude of tools, menus, palettes, pull-down options, and features become second nature, and Illustrator feels like an unconscious extension of your mind. Adobe Illustrator is the clear PCMag Editors’ Choice winner for vector graphics design.
