BYTE.com > BYTE Media Lab > 2006
Not Your Father's Illustrator
By David Em
May 8, 2006
(Not Your Father's Illustrator
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Adobe's Illustrator CS2 vector art program is one of the most evolved imaging programs on the market. Now that Adobe has acquired Macromedia, it's probably safe to assume that Macromedia's FreeHand will go quietly into that good night, leaving Corel's DRAW as Illustrator's only real competitor.
Recently, I took the latest CS2 version of Illustrator (aka Version 12) for a drive, and was nothing short of amazed at how much more capable it has become since I last looked at it. A slew of new tools have transformed it from a simple line art and flat color generation program into a visualization powerhouse.
Then and Now
Illustrator first appeared in 1987, a time when color bitmap pictures strained RAM, storage, and processor capacities to their limits. Unlike bitmap images, vector art objects are mathematical descriptions that require very little storage space or I/O bandwidth. During the period when publishing was transitioning from a mechanical to a digital process, vector art was used wherever possible in magazines, posters, and other graphic art applications.
All of this was great from a technical standpoint, but I never cared for the actual images created with vector art programs. No matter who designed them, they all looked pretty much alike. Perhaps you remember all those awful illustrations that used to appear in the PC and Mac magazines. To say they looked like cheesy cartoons would be charitable.
Despite its funky output, Illustrator excelled at vector line and curve generation and modulation. Consequently, in addition to being a graphic design tool, it became a popular front end for vector-intensive 2D animation programs like Macromedia Flash, and 3D modeling apps such as Autodesk Maya. Over time, Illustrator's .ai file format became an industry standard, readable across a wide variety of graphics and multimedia applications.
Interface
Illustrator's current interface exists between three different design stages:
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