Adobe Illustrator

Illustrator is great when you need to design 2d pieces, especially if you are animating or printing.

Don't let the rating fool you. Illustrator is incredibly usable, but it's not new-user-friendly. You are going to need to spend a long time being tutored or teaching yourself this program. It's excellent once you learn the ins and outs, but it's a long, long road to get there.

Adobe does an OK job of providing online tutorials for using different tools within Illustrator, but honestly, you'll find better or just as good tutorials elsewhere.

We often get bad raster images of logos and are able to trace and recreate them as a vector which is needed to make use of them in new projects. We also often need to create new icons for applications and it is the only good way to do this. We also are able to export in a wide number of formats.

Documentation of adobes products has always been lacking. They seem to rely on online communities which are painful to search and find solutions in. Illustrator is no exception as little usable official documentation is available online and contacting support is a slow and often frustrating process. Adobe support is a constant problem across all mainline products.

Illustrator has become easier in recent years to use with more intuitive tools and controls for them. Illustration software has improved but Adobe Illustrator has kept up and keeps the edge with its extensive toolset. Newly added collaboration tools with Adobe make it even better and the expectation is that is to continue.

Illustrator is great for handling vector artwork. We use it for digital illustration, branding, iconography and anything else that would be helpful to create as a vector. I think it excels in handling artwork for print. I know many people also use it for designing interfaces, but I personally think it is less well-suited for that application.

The learning curve is steep and it's not always obvious why a path is behaving a certain way, but it does a great job of presenting a set of tools to the pro user for artwork creation. Of all of Adobe's Creative Suite products, Illustrator is the one we ask ourselves the most internal "How to" questions about. We can usually figure out a path forward, but it's not always an obvious answer.

We haven't ever needed to contact Adobe support for Illustrator. Once installed, it performs how it should and updates when expected. We certainly have questions about how certain features work sometimes, but we usually are able to answer those questions internally before needing to reach out to the support team.

Adobe Illustrator is great for anything involving graphics and animation! Design and layout are made easy in this software, especially if using other Adobe software. It's perfect to use for any type of creative work- from marketing to video. It doesn't make sense to have if you are in accounting or something completely unrelated to art and design.

Once you've used one Adobe software, they are all a bit similar in usage. Illustrator is basically a more advanced Photoshop. It can be a bit overwhelming when first opening the program and understanding the ins and outs. But once you get the hang of it you can really knock out projects quickly and efficiently.

I haven't needed much support for Illustrator, but I have reached out to Adobe support for other programs and usually have a decent experience. It's an outsourced department so the language barrier can sometimes cause a setback. They easily accommodate your needs and even screen share to address whatever problem you have.