Definition of Adobe Illustrator – Are you just starting to explore the world of graphic design and illustration? If you want to study graphic design, surely you have this question: “what software to use?” There are so many popular design applications and of course you can be confused about choosing one. You can see the best design applications here !
With the help of various applications, exploring your new hobby can be even more fun. One of the choices of these various applications is Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator. Mastering these two applications can make you adept at drawing digitally and being creative in the world of graphics. That way, your new hobby can become additional income, even a more serious career choice.
However, if you are confused about having to use the Adobe Photoshop or Adobe Illustrator applications, you should read this article to the end. These two applications are both popular in the world of design, but they are quite different in their uses. No need to linger, sinaumedia has summarized information about this application just for you. The following is a complete explanation of Adobe Illustrator.
Definition of Adobe Illustrator
Adobe Illustrator is a popular software application among professionals, business design, and the art world that is used by graphic designers to create vector graphics. This vector graphics editor program-based application was developed and marketed by Adobe Systems.
Adobe began developing Illustrator in 1985. Although it had been developed since 1985, Adobe Illustrator was only officially released in January 1987. Adobe began designing and programming in 1985 which was a companion application to Photoshop.
Illustrator version 1.7 was released as Illustrator 88. It was so named because it was released in 1988. Illustrator 88 was introduced with richer tools and features than the previous version. In 1989, Adobe Illustrator 88 was named by Byte as the winner of the Byte Award because it was claimed to be better than its competitor, namely Aldus FreeHand.
This application offers a variety of sophisticated tools that can create vector-based illustrations, icons, typography, and other forms of design work. Adobe Illustrator is a software application that belongs to the Adobe Creative Cloud.
Illustrator CC is the latest version of this program, the twentieth generation of Illustrator products. This application has the function of creating graphic works. The works that you can make include logos, icons, illustrations, product packaging, typography, to large advertisements on billboards .
According to the information on the official website , the graphic processing results of this application are in vector form. According to Vectr , a vector is a type of image that cannot be broken, even if it is enlarged many times. This is what makes Adobe Illustrator suitable for use in making any illustration, including logos and icons. This is because the quality of the images will be maintained and will not break, even if they are resized to suit their use.
So, to dive deeper into this graphical application, let’s dive right into its superior functions and features, come on!
Adobe Illustrator Functions
This application is usually used to create various design needs ranging from logos, promotional content, graphics, digital artwork, even websites. Adobe Illustrator is quite popular for graphic design projects related to marketing, advertising, and for processing digital artwork professionally.
In the view of graphic designers, Adobe Illustrator can be used to create various digital images and print media. The main function of Adobe Illustrator is to draw or design illustrations in vector form. Apart from that, Adobe Illustrator can also make tracing on photo objects, recolor objects, or make a photo look like a sketch.
Apart from drawing illustrations, this software also makes it possible to manipulate text and create multimedia designs. Adobe Illustrator users are also supported to create and design mock-up designs as icon templates or design shapes displayed in applications and websites.
In terms of vector image quality owned by Adobe Illustrator, indirectly this software has the use of creating good work in terms of image quality. The functions and uses of the Adobe Illustrator software are very diverse, depending on the basic and exploratory abilities of the graphic designer who wants to process design drawings.
In detail, some of the multimedia design works produced from Adobe Illustrator are:
- Media Content Design.
- Application Design.
- Logos.
- Watermarks.
- Website/Blog Design.
- Illustration Design.
- Icon Design.
- Billboards, Banners and Banners.
- Design of Tables, Graphs and Diagrams.
- Cartoon Design.
Of the many works that can be designed using Adobe Illustrator, the job of a graphic designer is very profitable if involved in a commercial or business form through this application. This is because Adobe Illustrator is currently often used by media companies to serve clients’ wishes for design purposes, such as product advertisements, politics, media service companies, social media admin designs, and so on.
If you need to create a design from scratch and don’t need to edit existing images, you can use Adobe Illustrator. The tools offered by this application are more complete, so that they can improve the results of the designs you make.
Adobe Illustrator is very suitable for processing designs such as logo designs, brand designs, illustrations, and typography designs, while Adobe Photoshop is suitable for use if you are going to process designs with images. This application is suitable for working on types of design such as photo manipulation, photo editing, poster design, digital collage and advertisement design.
Superior Features of Adobe Illustrator
The features in Adobe Illustrator are usually called tools . Through existing tools , you can produce a variety of special digital images. Summarized from Tutsplus and Mashable , some of the tools in Adobe Illustrator include:
1. Toolboxes
The toolbox or tools panel is the most frequently used menu in Adobe Illustrator. This is because there are various menu functions for creating various objects in the Illustrator document. The tools panel is located on the left sidebar with more than 50 tools icons. Some of them are the selection tool (V), direct selection tool (A), magic wand tool (Y), lasso tool (Q), and many other tools that users can learn.
2. Pen Tool
The core tool of Adobe Illustrator is called the pen tool . With the pen tool , you can draw almost any shape you can imagine. There is an option to change the sharpness of the intersection points of your image to give the shape of the image a variety. It all depends on your own creation.
3. Pathfinder
Apart from the pen tool , another tool that you can use to modify shapes is the pathfinder . If the pen tool is used for drawing, pathfinder is used to modify the shape of an object based on certain other objects.
You can cultivate two different shapes according to your creativity. There are many variations of the pathfinder with different functions. To be clearer, you can see the difference between the four in the image below.
4. Clipping Masks
What if you want to transfer patterns or colors from one object to another? Clipping masks are the answer. The way this Adobe Illustrator tool works is by copying the color or pattern of one object. After that, the color or pattern will be placed on another object that you have specified.
5.Type
The tool that of course cannot be missed is type . With this tool, you can type whatever you want. You can also set the type, size, and spacing between fonts.
6. Making Patterns
The next featured tool from Adobe Illustrator is pattern . Through this feature, you can make patterns without having to repeat certain designs. That way, your digital design process can be much more efficient.
7. Live Trace
Live trace is the next interesting tool that you can use. Before this feature, graphic designers or illustrators had to scan documents to convert them into digital format. After that, they have to use the pen tool to redraw by “tracing” their own work.
The solution to the inefficiency of this process is live trace . With this tool , you can convert image and photo formats into vectors. If the format has changed, all you have to do is make a few adjustments here and there to suit your needs.
8. Color Palette
The Color Palette feature is used to make coloring by specifying the fill color ( fill ) and the stroke ( stroke ). In this color palette, various color parameters will be displayed from the RGB and CMYK coloring types.
9. Transparency Palette
The transparency palette is part of the tool used to adjust the opacity level of the objects created. The transparency palette in Adobe Illustrator’s latest features is further enhanced by providing object or layer sliders. This palette also provides a new opacity mask control with an object fill color luminance value to cover the underlying object. For example, a darker color will be masked to be more opaque than a lighter color. In essence, this Opacity mask will create more complex transparency and masking effects directly.
10. Stroke Palette
This section of the stroke palette is used by users to outline objects or are called outlines . This tool provides line thickness settings in vector objects that are set according to the user’s wishes.
11. Gradient Palette
The gradient palette will help the user in adjusting the position of the color gradation in a selected vector object. The default color of the gradation is black and white, then it can be adjusted to a variety of colors taken for object coloring.
12. Layers Palette
The Layers palette is a basic palette that graphic designers always encounter, because this layer section is always applied in Adobe System software for image processing applications, one of which is Adobe Photoshop. In Adobe Illustrator, layers also play an important role in designing design objects. The Layers palette will organize information on the list or place of object layers on the artboard or worksheet board.
This discussion only reviews a few of the many features offered by Adobe Illustrator. Always try new things and explore to get the most out of this app.
The difference between Adobe Illustrator and other applications
1. Difference Between Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw
Adobe Illustrator and CorelDraw are very well known and are always relied on by designers, because the applications are perfect and have complete features. Both of these applications have vector-based image types, but there are still major differences between the two.
In terms of features, Adobe Illustrator is more complete than CorelDraw. Adobe Illustrator can maintain its original colors when printed and this application is great for creating illustration designs, while CorelDraw is often used by production companies for the production process because of its general appearance and easy recognition for ordinary users. However, CorelDraw cannot produce images as good as Adobe Illustrator, although it is not inferior to bitmap or raster based images.
2. The difference between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop
The basic difference between Adobe Illustrator and Adobe Photoshop is that Adobe Illustrator is vector-based software and is more suitable for creating scalable logo designs, while Adobe Photoshop is more suitable for work that uses images and edits designs that have already been made.
Here’s the difference between the two in more detail:
- Adobe Illustrator has layers with many objects, unlike Adobe Photoshop where each layer can only contain one object.
- Adobe Illustrator is vector graphics-based software, so it allows you to process designs sharper and clearer than Adobe Photoshop.
- When running Adobe Illustrator, you can use multiple artboards in one project, whereas in Adobe Photoshop you can only use one canvas.
- When running Adobe Photoshop, you can use the area selection tool , whereas in Adobe Illustrator you only make it possible to select objects.
Adobe Illustrator Prices
So, even though it’s rich in features, Adobe Illustrator is an application that you can’t use for free. You need to pay a subscription fee to legally enjoy the features and tools . Based on information on Adobe’s official website, the subscription scheme options include:
- Adobe Illustrator application only, which is IDR 283,300 per month.
- Access to all Adobe applications, which is IDR 715,100 per month.
Alternative Applications
You already understand that Adobe Illustrator is one of the most feature-rich graphics applications. Unfortunately, not everyone has the money to subscribe to the paid version of this app. You don’t need to worry, there are many alternative applications that function similarly, but can be used for free.
As reported by the NY Film Academy , several free alternatives to Adobe Illustrator include:
- SVG-edit, access via browser on computer.
- InkScape, access via Windows and Linux.
- Affinity Designer, access via MacOS.
- OpenOffice Draw, access via Windows, Linux, and MacOS.
- Serif DrawPlus, access via Windows.
Conclusion
From a brief review regarding the definition of Adobe Illustrator above, it can be concluded that Adobe Illustrator is Adobe Inc.’s vector-based image processing software. This software continues to experience development from the old version of Illustrator 1.0 since 1987 to the Illustrator CC version since 2013 until now. Adobe Illustrator brings the latest features from each release, it’s no wonder that many professional designers choose this software for editing and creating designs.
That is a complete explanation from sinaumedia regarding the meaning, superior features, and subscription prices for the Adobe Illustrator application. Hopefully it can help and be useful in understanding it. Are you increasingly interested in trying it? Proficient in using Adobe Illustrator is one of the capitals for a career as a graphic designer. However, besides mastering the application, you are also required to have other skills that must be constantly honed.
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