Adobe Illustrator Review: Pros, Cons & Verdict (2022)

July 02,2024

What is Adobe Illustrator?

Adobe Illustrator is an application that is utilized to make logos, textual styles, presentations, in sequential order and numerical pictures, posters, and flex, as this is a vector-based program so the pictures can be made regardless of size and Illustrator was the first software to dispatch this element and turned out to be generally well known in graphic designing businesses, Adobe Illustrator can be characterized as the product which was the main application already that was made for graphic designers, it was first launched in 1987.

Adobe Illustrator can be defined as the software which was the only software previously that was made for graphic designers. It was first developed in 1987 with a full-featured program for windows. Initially, it gave sophisticated tracing and text manipulation commands with color separation features as well.

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Understanding

Adobe Illustrator is good to start for freshers as they can learn this software in an easier way. While buying Adobe, they provide with notes and guides which briefs us about all features. Here are some tricks to understand: –

Initially, when you start using it, just go on scribbling, which makes you interact with this software, and it is a very easy task that makes you learn. When you enter deeply into making fonts and some basic designs, then don’t use colors; instead, use “fill white” and black shades. This keeps you focused on your art. Once you start using the Pen tool, you need to have control over your mouse to perfectly draw shapes like circle, ellipse, rectangle, etc. Later on, start filling the colors to enhance your skills and grab on new commands.

How does Adobe Illustrator make working so easy?

It is a tool which consists of versatile commands like pen tool, swatches, mesh tool, and image trace, etc. These commands make our drawing faster and easier.

Top Companies

There are loads of companies who need a graphic designer as it is the basic need to design their logos of every individual product. Still, some famous brands have thousands of products and keep updating their product, for which there is a requirement of the graphic designer.

Hewlett Packard Pfizer Air bnb Thumbtack Net App Zendesk Mankind Pharma

What can you do with Adobe Illustrator?

We can design mostly banners as these are vector images and has the quality to control pixels. Adobe Illustrator designs small numerical and alphabetical images which not bounded by particular dimensions. Wedding and invitation cards are designed by using this software. Images used on various websites continuously, especially on e-commerce websites, are totally designed by using this software.

Working

This software provides you with a perfect friendly user interface. If you are working in a team, then it makes your job easier if you want to train a new employee. Once you become an expert, you will realize the ease of working and the way of getting work done.

Advantages

Working with this software makes you more comfortable as it has ample of advantages.

It has some readymade tools which give you a variety of shapes. You can make a banner of any size start from small dot to large flex. Importing, editing and modifying of images can be done within one platform. It is comfortable if it is used simultaneously with the other product of Adobe.

Skills Required

To be an expert, you don’t need to have any special skills as experience will teach you within less span of time. Still, some photographic skills will be an added advantage if you have. Also, if you are good at painting and drawing sketches, then you will become professional within no time.

Why should we use it?

Adobe Illustrator is a software which is running for more than 30 years and has covered 100% of all commands. Adobe is expertise in this field, and this software is used by almost all professionals that make our learning easier from them. This can save you money if you buy a license of Illustrator and other Adobe products.

Scope

There is a requirement of an expert of this software in all various companies as it is a key part of marketing. Everyone wants to make their logo and product look more attractive, and then there is a need for a graphic designer, in big e-commerce projects like Flipkart, Amazon, Myntra where they update their products on a daily basis, so they need a graphic designer as they have to upload multiple images of the single product.

Why do we need it?

This software consists of all commands as it saves your time in using multiple software simultaneously. You can convert your images in any format as almost all formats are included in the latest version. Adobe Illustrator helps you to get jobs faster as it is widely used everywhere, and for the company, they get expert candidates everywhere.

Who is the right audience for learning Adobe Illustrator Technologies?

People who make big flex logos and banners, graphic images for websites and sometimes in photographic activities. Those candidates who deal with all these activities are the best for learning.

How will this Technology help you in Career Growth?

You need to have good experience in handling this software then you may get a good salaried job. Basically, this is skilled work, so you have to show your talent. Also, how fast you develop your skills and how attractive graphics you make depends upon what you decide your path of success.

Conclusion

Adobe is the only software in the market which is very old and is seen mostly in every industry. This acts as one tool for all, which saves your money from buying other software’s if you are uniquely involved in a particular activity. As mentioned above that, you have good career growth if you learn this, and you get wide scope for applying in almost every company. This makes you more professional and versatile by giving new and advanced tools.

Adobe Explains It All: Illustrator

**When it comes to using the right Adobe software for your projects, there are so many options to choose from, spanning After Effects to EchoSign, Acrobat to Muse. There’s Test and Target, Analytics, and Campaign, too. The solution that’s right for you will, of course, depend on what you’re looking to achieve, so we’ve created this new series to help explain some of our key offerings.

For this installment, we reached out to Adobe Group Product Manager Anubhav Rohatgi to talk about Adobe Illustrator, the premium software application for artists and designers looking to create and modify scalable vector graphics.

Anubhav, when was Adobe Illustrator first created?

The first version of Illustrator, which was conceived of by Adobe cofounder John Warnock, appeared about 28 years ago, in late 1986. The first version available to the general public was released on March 19, 1987.

Who is it for?

Illustrator is used by artists and graphic designers who create logos, icons, charts, infographics, posters, ads, books, magazines, and brochures. Even comic book illustrators use it. It’s the industry-standard software application for anyone, anywhere, who wants to work with vector graphics. If you look at the Adobe logo, for instance, it needs to look as nice and sharp on a business card as it does on a three-story billboard. To create graphics that can scale in size and still look sharp, without any pixilation, you need to use vector graphics, which use mathematical equations to preserve the shapes of images at any size or scale. Unless you use vector graphics, images are not going to scale well or the files are going to be too big in size.

Where is Illustrator used the most?

Actually, just about every industry uses Illustrator, from two-dimensional CAD designs in engineering fields to the greeting cards made by Hallmark. People designing watches use Illustrator, and people designing shoes use it too. It’s the standard tool for apparel design, including T-shirts, and almost all packaging design work is done in Illustrator—such as, say, the label for a wine bottle, or the packaging of your favorite orange juice. Look at the icons for apps on your mobile phone or tablet: they’re almost all done in Illustrator. Surface designers create patterns in Illustrator, which can then be put on carpets, tiles, or textiles. I have to mention the Japanese, too. They were early adopters and really love Illustrator, creating calligraphy and other beautiful print work with it.

What are some of the other products in the Illustrator family?

We currently have Illustrator Line and Illustrator Draw. These two iPad applications are part of the Illustrator family, and the vision behind these apps is to allow people to work on mobile devices and then bring their work to the desktop and carry on with it there. Illustrator Line is for perspective drawing and especially good for drafting or architecture, since it lets you visualize a building or any design in perspective. And Illustrator Draw is simply an excellent tool for drawing, coloring, and illustration. They’re both used by artists to create all kinds of beautiful work. I’m always surprised and amazed by what people are able to do with our tools, and I think the constraints of certain applications seem to force them to be even more creative.

Why do designers choose to use Illustrator over other Adobe design programs like Photoshop?

Using vector graphics gives you much more flexibility than using raster images in your design process, since it’s easy to go back and change any individual curve or line or color without having to start from scratch. So if that appeals to you as a designer, Illustrator’s the tool for you. More often than not, though, Illustrator and Photoshop are used together because each product is best at what it does, and they complement each other well. Illustrator is the best vector-editing software, and Photoshop the best image-editing software, on the market.

Finally, how would the world be different if Illustrator had never existed?

It is really hard to imagine, like trying to imagine a world devoid of art. Illustrator makes it possible for me to realize my vision. Even though I may not have the most dexterity when it comes to creating art or design, it’s Illustrator that makes it possible for a less dexterous person, as well as really talented one, to both realize their potential with digital tools. Their vector-based artwork can then be transformed into all formats and disseminated at literally any size with no loss in quality—to be seen on the side of a building, on an IMAX screen, in a magazine, or on an iPhone. Illustrator is one of those things that brings joy to our lives, giving us amazingly beautiful artwork, but it also makes everyday signs and designs enjoyable too.

Adobe Illustrator Review: Pros, Cons & Verdict (2022)

Adobe Illustrator Thomas Boldt Effectiveness: An extremely capable vector and layout creation tool Price: A bit expensive, better value in the full package deal Ease of Use: Easy to start working with, but very difficult to master Support: Excellent tutorials available from a wide range of sources Summary Adobe Illustrator is an excellent multi-talented vector editor. It can be used to create incredible illustrative artwork, corporate logos, page layouts, website mockups, and almost anything else that you might need. The interface is clean and well-designed, and the tools are flexible, powerful, and robust thanks to Illustrator’s long development history.

On the downside, Illustrator can be a bit overwhelming to new users. It’s easy to start learning how to use it, but it’s very difficult to become a master of everything it offers. The sheer number of tools that it contains can be intimidating, and it’s almost a requirement that you follow some sort of tutorial instruction when you begin using it.

What I Like: Powerful Vector Creation Tools. Flexible Workspace Layout. Creative Cloud Integration. GPU Acceleration Support. Multiple Mobile App Integrations.

What I Don’t Like: Steep Learning Curve. 4.5 Get Adobe Illustrator

What is Adobe Illustrator? It is an industry-standard vector graphics creation tool available for both Windows and Mac. It uses mathematically-defined paths to create outlines of shapes which then can be manipulated and combined to create the desired final image. The latest version of the program is part of the Adobe Creative Cloud program suite. What is a vector image? For those of you who aren’t familiar with the term, there are two types of digital image: raster images and vector images. Raster images are the most common, and they’re made up of grids of pixels that each have a color and brightness value – all your digital photos are raster images. Vector images are actually a series of mathematical expressions that define the shapes and color values of each element of the picture. This has a number of advantages, but the biggest one is that because a vector image is pure mathematics, it can be scaled to any size without losing quality. Is Adobe Illustrator free? Adobe Illustrator is not free software, but there is a 7-day free trial available. After that, Illustrator is available as a monthly subscription package in one of three formats: as a standalone program for $19.99 USD per month with a year-long commitment, $29.99 for a month-to-month subscription, or as part of the full Creative Cloud suite subscription which includes access to all of the Adobe products for $49.99 per month. Where can I buy Adobe Illustrator? Adobe Illustrator is exclusively available as a digital download from the Adobe website. Adobe has migrated all of their software offerings to a digital-only format under the Creative Cloud branding system, so it is no longer possible to buy physical copies of the software on CD or DVD. You can visit the Adobe Illustrator page here to learn more about purchasing options. Any Good Adobe Illustrator Tutorials for Beginners? Illustrator is easy to start learning and difficult to master, but fortunately, there are extensive tutorials and support resources available to help make the learning process easy. There are a lot of specific tutorials available online through a simple Google search, but they don’t always use the latest version of Illustrator, and they don’t always have proper explanations or best practices. Here are a few resources for beginners that show you the right way things should be done: Adobe’s own Illustrator tutorials (free)

Adobe Illustrator Tutorials by IllustratorHow (super in-depth guides)

Adobe Illustrator CC Classroom in a Book

Illustrator Essential Training (paid subscription required for full access)

Why Trust Me for This Review

Hi, my name is Thomas Boldt, and I’m a university-educated graphic designer with extensive experience working with image creation and editing software. I’ve been using Illustrator since the very first Creative Suite edition was released back in 2003, and I’ve been working with it both personally and professionally over the course of its development into the current Creative Cloud edition.

Disclaimer: Adobe provided me with no compensation or other consideration for the writing of this review, and they have had no editorial input or review of the content. It must also be noted that I’m a subscriber of the Creative Cloud (including Illustrator) beyond the purposes of this review.

Detailed Review of Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator is a large program and I don’t have time or space to cover everything that it can do, so I’m going to focus on the major uses of the app. One of the strengths of Illustrator is that it can be used in many different ways, so rather than simply listing its features I’ll break things down by function and take a close look at the interface.

The screenshots below are taken using the Windows version of the program, but the Mac version looks almost exactly identical.

The Illustrator Workspace

Opening Illustrator gives you several options on how to proceed, but for the purposes of the screenshots here we’ll just create a new 1920×1080 document using the RGB color mode.

Because Illustrator can be tweaked to match your particular goal or working style, the interface comes with a number of different layout presets. These presets can be incredibly helpful, but it’s often best to customize things to match your unique personal working style. Of course, you need to get familiar with the program to know what you’ll need, so the Essentials workspace preset is a good base to work from. I tend to customize mine by adding in various typography and alignment tools, but that’s just a reflection of how I use the program.

In general, you’ve got the Tools panel on the left, options for the tool you’re using across the top, and additional optional settings on the right. If you’d prefer a different layout, you can completely customize these options by dragging and dropping the various panels to wherever you’d like, or you can undock them and leave them as floating windows.

If you do this by accident, or if it turns out your new workspace doesn’t work as well as you’d hoped, you can completely reset things by going to the Window menu, navigating to Workspaces, and choosing the Reset option. You can create as many custom workspaces as you want, or customize any of the presets that already exist.

Vector-based Illustration

It should be no surprise that this is one of the major uses of Illustrator – there’s a reason they named it that, after all. This is also one of the trickiest parts of Illustrator to master, depending on how complex you want your illustrations to be. If you’re working with icons or emoji-style graphics, it can be quite easy to create what you want. There is a range of preset shapes you can start with and then customize, allowing you to quickly build up a cute figure in no time at all.

This teddy bear is made entirely out of modified circles

If you want to get into more complex illustrations, then you’re going to have to come to terms with the use of the Pen tool. This is one of the most powerful tools in Illustrator, but it can also be one of the most difficult to master. The basics are easy: you create anchor points by clicking, which are then joined by lines to form a complete shape. If you click and drag while creating an anchor point, suddenly your line starts to become a curve. Each curve affects the subsequent curves, and this is when things start to get tricky.

Fortunately, Illustrator now includes a specific tool for creating smooth curves, the unimaginatively named Curvature tool. This is a huge usability improvement for most pen-based drawing, although it sometimes does a bit too much hand-holding.

Of course, you can always illustrate freehand using the Paintbrush tool if you prefer, although using this tool with a mouse can be frustrating. It’s most effective if you have access to a drawing tablet, which is essentially a pen-shaped mouse on a pressure sensitive surface. This accessory is a must for anyone who wants to do serious freehand work, although it is now possible to use a touchscreen tablet or smartphone with one of the Adobe mobile apps (more on them later!).

Quick Prototyping

This is one of my favorite uses for Illustrator, because I don’t actually do a lot of illustration in my practice except for logo work. The fact that it’s incredibly easy to move objects around in Illustrator makes it a great workspace for quickly creating and comparing different versions of a logo, various typefaces and other projects where you need to develop a lot of different iterations.

Of course, words often start to lose meaning when you stare at them too long…

Trying to do this kind of work in a layer-based app like Photoshop makes the process much slower, because you have to select the individual layer you’re working on in order to customize it, and those few extra steps really mount up over time. It’s possible to create layers in Illustrator too, but they’re more useful as an organizational tool. Having each item as a separate object makes manipulating them quite easy, almost as simple as having physical objects on a table in front of you.

Layout Composition

Despite being primarily intended for illustration, page layout is a great usage of Illustrator’s capabilities. It doesn’t work well for multi-page documents (a job where Adobe InDesign is king), but for a single page it works quite well. It has an excellent set of typographic tools included, and the fact that you can quickly select any object makes it easy to move objects around during the composition phase.

Being able to quickly select the various objects in your composition and align them with the click of a button is incredibly helpful and a huge time-saver. While Illustrator is primarily for vector graphics, it can still work effectively with raster images and incorporates them into a layout quite easily.

If you want to edit a raster image in-depth, it’s as simple as selecting the image and choosing ‘Edit Original’. If you’ve got Photoshop installed as well, it will use that as the default raster editor, and as soon as you save your edits in Photoshop the version in your Illustrator document will update immediately. This interoperability is one of the great advantages of embracing the entire Creative Cloud, although you can choose to use any other raster image editor you have installed.

These tools also make Illustrator a great option for creating website mockups, although Adobe is currently developing a new program called Adobe Comp CC. It’s only available for mobile devices at the moment, however, so Illustrator is still an excellent choice for the desktop environment.

Mobile App Integrations

Adobe has been investing heavily in their mobile app development, and one of the more effective results of this is Illustrator’s mobile companion app, Adobe Illustrator Draw (or just Adobe Draw for short). There are also integrations for Photoshop Sketch and Comp CC, which follow the same principles. As always, it’s important to choose the right tool for the job, and Adobe has covered all the bases here.

The Draw app itself is free for both Android and iOS, and it takes full advantage of the touchscreen on your smartphone or tablet to let you create vector illustration work on the go, acting as a digital sketchbook. If you don’t have access to a drawing tablet on your desktop, you can suddenly get hand-drawn objects into your Illustrator designs with ease. Creating something in the app is simple, and syncing it to your Creative Cloud account happens automatically.

This isn’t exactly a calligraphic masterpiece, but it gets the point across