The WebDev Buzz

The Adobe company has its own font development software.  This software, together with the PostScript file format was then commercialized when a new program, called the Adobe Illustrator, was developed for Apple Macintosh in 1985.  Thus began the dramatic ups and downs of the history of the Adobe Illustrator.

The birth of the Adobe Illustrator was not filled with predictions of high profits and sweeping popularity.  It was primarily created for Macintosh, which does not possess a high percentage of the market.   And the design of the original Adobe Illustrator software (called Illustrator 1.0) made it impossible for other printers, except for Apple’s LaserWriter, to print its documents.

The Adobe Illustrator is basically a drawing program, but when it was released to the market, it has a novel feature called “Bézier curves”.  Obviously, this new drawing paradigm is unfamiliar to the targeted users.  Such problem is compounded by the inability of the Macintosh to show multicolor graphics.

Yet, despite all these stumbling blocks, the Adobe Illustrator gained a strong foothold in the market.  It helped force the Macintosh to develop bigger monitors.  And it proved to be a dependable software that required only a short time to be mastered by its users.  In fact, its new drawing paradigm, the “Bézier curves”, quickly gained popularity.

The “Bézier curves” is more precise than the MacDraw (the existing drawing program during that time).  Yet, this drawing paradigm is less complicated than AutoCAD.  At its young age, the Adobe Illustrator found its niche market, squarely right between the too simplistic painting programs and the too complex CAD software.

The original Adobe Illustrator soon gave way to a new version called Illustrator 1.1, which included a video of John Warnock, the founder of Adobe.  In the video, Warnock showed the features of the new version.  This was probably one of the reasons why the Illustrator 1.1 became extremely popular.

Two more versions came out, the Illustrator 88 (indicating the year it was released, 1988) and the Illustrator 3.0.  The latter has a greatly improved capability in text layout.  But a competitor, Aldus, released its own drawing program called FreeHand, a software that has the ability to produce true blend fills.  This ability made the FreeHand an essential program in desktop publishing.  Fortunately, after several years, the next versions of Adobe Illustrator can support true blended fills.

In 1989, a version of Adobe Illustrator, called 2.0, was created for Microsoft Windows.  But users ignored it.  The next version, called 4.0, suffered the same fate and was even censured for duplicating the features of an old version, the 1.1.  Aside from this lack of attractive features, there is also the presence of a competitor, another drawing program called CorelDraw.

Technology came to the rescue in 1997 and the Adobe Illustrator was eventually standardized, with its more sophisticated features in Macintosh assimilated into Windows.  The Illustrator again enjoyed popularity.  Today, the current version is 12 or Adobe Illustrator CS2.  The usual image of Venus in earlier versions has been changed to stylized flowers.

The present Adobe Illustrator CS2 is a fully-loaded drawing program that can be used for both Macintosh and Windows.  Its main features include sophisticated tracing, text manipulation, and color separations.  It can be utilized in Web publishing and in rasterization previewing.  Like Adobe Photoshop, it has several plug-ins.