*** From the Archives ***

This article is from December 26, 2012, and is no longer current.

A gift for Adobe Illustrator fans and DTP history buffs

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Christmas is over but if you’re an Illustrator fan who didn’t quite get what you wanted, don’t despair. There’s still one gift for you lurking under the tree. And by "tree" I mean the Apple App Store. AI Early Years is a free app for iPad that chronicles the birth and development of Adobe Illustrator with photos, video, interactive graphics, and interviews from the folks who were there.

With the app, you can learn why Boticelli’s Venus came to appear on the splash screen (think: "hair"), and why Bézier curves were used. The app also includes behind-the-scenes photos, slideshows of the original sample artwork, and a gallery of splash screens with the new features from each version of Illustrator from 1.1 to CS6.

Here’s the product description:

Adobe Illustrator shipped on March 19, 1987. It was Adobe’s first software application based on Adobe PostScript, the technology that changed the entire publishing industry. Illustrator not only altered Adobe’s course dramatically, it changed drawing and line art forever.

For a lot of the current users of Illustrator it’s hard to imagine the impact that Illustrator made in a world where designs and illustrations were done manually.

With the app ‘Adobe Illustrator, the early years’ we want to give some insight into the early years of Illustrator and celebrate the creative freedom that Illustrator brought to designers and illustrators.

 

Editor in Chief of CreativePro. Instructor at LinkedIn Learning with courses on InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, GIMP, Inkscape, and Affinity Publisher.
  • Anonymous says:

    I’m not an iPad user, nor a Mac user – yet I would still be interested in this type of history. Would there be any way the rest of us could view this?

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