Adobe Illustrator

Please post links to screenshots and/or insights of this vector graphics application. We must learn from strengths and mistakes of others.

Adobe Illustrator is one of the most commercially successful vector graphics applications among artists and graphic designers, with MacromediaFreehand as the main competitor and probably CorelDraw coming in a third place. (Adobe has since bought Macromedia and it will be interesting to see which Macromedia products will survive.) However, the relative strength of various vector editors depends on the market; for example in Russia and some other markets in Europe, CorelDraw is more common than Illustrator.

We can often learn more from criticisms of Illustrator than we can learn from praise, and a Corel Draw user by the name of Guntis make some interesting criticisms of Illustrator, especially the comments about how it fails even to be consistent even with Adobe Photoshop.

Sample Files

• Versions of Illustrato 3 - 10 files converted from Open Clip Art Library graphics
• Jon Leighton's samples

Screenshots

• Adobe Illustrator 10 win32 Screenshots

• Adobe Illustrator CS

Links

• Adobe Illustrator Official Site
• Adobe Illustrator at Wikipedia
• the Inkscape Roadmap has native support for AI files at milestone 0.45

Useful Introduction to Adobe Illustrator including screenshots of the menus which I found very useful for reference.

License

Commercial Proprietary Software. Retails for roughly $500 USD alone but also available as part of the Adobe Creative Suite.

Although Adobe Photoshop Elements provides a budget alternative to the full price Adobe Photoshop, Adobe makes no attempt to provide any such cut price alternative to Illustrator.

All trademarks and copyrights are the property of their respective owners and used here only for review purposes.

Comments

Jon Cruz wrote: And there are two other large factors for Adobe's UI design that must be kept in mind:

1) "I don't care if this sucks, we need it thus-and-so so that we can sell more copies of Photoshop"

2) "who cares how if functions, the marketing department said we need to do these so they can put it on brochures"