Item: Adobe Illustrator CC
Rating: 8
Author: Kelly Reumann

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Illustrator CC

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

Adobe Illustrator is currently just being used within our design team. We use it to create artwork for products, packaging/labels, and marketing collateral. Like all of the Adobe programs, it is a top notch vector program. The program is a bit more in depth than others but that's a good thing. It allows us to create better quality quality work.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Illustrator has a wealth of different tools which allow you to work quickly and easily, once you get the hang of the interface.
Illustrator also works seamlessly with Photoshop which is a big deal for me. I switch back and forth between programs very often. Opening a file from illustrator poses no issues when opened in photoshop
Illustrator has the capacity to work on very large files or within many files at once. Other similar programs I've used tend to crash when overloaded with large files.

Cons

I don't know if it's a glitch or what but when I zoom in really close there tend to be little shadows of lines I've drawn. You can't actually interact with said lines, they're just there on the screen as a ghost of the line which I was zooming in to.

Return on Investment

Again, I don't have access to concrete numbers but it is a top-notch program and I'd imagine it could only have a positive impact on our sales numbers. This program allows our team to create, quickly and seamlessly, amazing pieces for our products/packaging

Alternatives Considered

Corel Draw is a vector creation program that I've used in the past and I can say definitively that Adobe Illustrator is incredibly more advanced. In addition, it works seamlessly with other Adobe programs. I don't know how many times Photoshop would have an issue opening a Corel file but it definitely slowed things down. Illustrator is just an industry standard tool so it's easy to pass files from one person to another without confusion or having to save as a different file type to open in a different program.

Likelihood to Recommend

Illustrator is a bit costly in comparison to other vector creation software out there so I'd recommend it for larger companies with more cash to spend. This program is also not for the beginner. I'd recommend it for anyone doing some serious graphic work. Something like Corel is simpler and easier for someone starting out with this kind of thing.

Comments

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Illustrator is the Eliminator! You won't want to use another vector software again.