No real choice, Adobe Illustrator CC is the only real option, and it's an amazing one!
October 31, 2017
No real choice, Adobe Illustrator CC is the only real option, and it's an amazing one!
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Illustrator CC
Adobe Illustrator CC is at the core of all of our designs. We often go between different Adobe products but we continually return to Adobe Illustrator as our go-to vector and design program. It's easy to use, well laid out and allows us to maximize our creativity. Adobe has really improved on previous versions of Illustrator and has made the integration seamless to all of the other Adobe creative offerings. All of the creatives on our team use Illustrator for their work. Video, design, print layouts and even our online content, all utilize Illustrator at some level. For the longest time, Illustrator's main focus was just on vector art. Adobe has done some amazing things to improve the uses of Illustrator into other design related area. We have been using Illustrator for print layouts, designs that include photos, website improvement mockups and social media focused content.
It really has become our go-to program that enables maximum creativity, all inside one design program. I find myself using Photoshop less and less and Illustrator and Lightroom more and more!
It really has become our go-to program that enables maximum creativity, all inside one design program. I find myself using Photoshop less and less and Illustrator and Lightroom more and more!
- Quick and reliable interface with consistency throughout all Adobe Creative Cloud products.
- Ability to create shortcuts in both keyboard shortcuts and menu shortcuts.
- Lightning fast and responsive interface. You can also adjust display preferences for slower machines.
- The tie in to other Adobe offerings (cloud storage, kuler color swatches, fonts and stock footage) is amazing. It speeds up all of our work!
- Price and yearly contract. You no longer own the software and get to decide when to purchase the next version. The only option is to pay per year.
- There isn't a great way to administrate fonts and ensure that Adobe will play nicely with them. This isn't particular to Illustrator, but to all Adobe CC programs.
- If going between Illustrator and After Effects, there is a very specific way to order your layers in order to have them editable in AE. This is super annoying because they force you to do this in an order that most designers are not used to working.
- We have seen a reduction in the number of design hours because of the tie in to Creative Cloud storage.
- We can reduce the number of software packages we had previously purchased since the license is tied to a login, and not to a serial number and disc.
- Gimp, SVG, Inkscape and coreldraw
Although there are a few alternatives to Illustrator CC, there really isn't a single other product that holds a candle to it. I've looked at GIMP and Corel Draw, but none of them really stack up in reliability, are as universally accepted/used and is as universal as Adobe Illustrator CC! Even after evaluating other products, to us, there wasn't even a real choice. We wanted to use Illustrator and couldn't be happier with our choice!
Using Adobe Illustrator CC
5 - The five of us who use Illustrator CC are all creative content producers. We represent video, motion graphics, print and digital design. Most of us are in Illustrator on an hourly basis.
4 - Illustrator CC is a fairly straightforward and a very easy product to support. Adobe's support chat is great and there are many online forums to help if you do run into an issue. I have found that the pace at which Adobe updates their software products can create some confusion when everyone on the team has not updated to the latest version. If using any Adobe CC product in a team environment, appoint one person to keep an eye on which version everyone should be operating on. Then have everyone upgrade at the same time. Once you upgrade, previous software versions can't open newer software versions.
- It's the perfect program to do layout work for print or digital designs.
- It's a great way to create elements for motion graphics that keep their vector quality and don't degrade as you enlarge or zoom in on the artwork.
- Using Illustrator CC gives you added benefits of the cloud platform to save and share files.
- It's pretty straightforward in its design use. We haven't been able to think outside of the box on how to use it in ways that are outside of design.
- We are looking into how to use Illustrator CC in our interior environment design.