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Still the Industry Standard
December 18, 2018

Still the Industry Standard

Dyke Habegger | TrustRadius Reviewer
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe Illustrator CC

The Creative Team in Marketing at my company uses Illustrator for all types of design work, from conceptual mockups to finished designs. In conjunction with the whole Adobe Creative Cloud (especially InDesign and Photoshop), Illustrator enables us to quickly and beautifully create lightweight, but detailed design work to support our brand.
  • Extremely robust vector editing tools are superior to most other vector graphics software. Illustrator has been the standard for two decades and continues to be.
  • Artboard flexibility. The addition of multiple, editable artboards a few generations ago allowed a single Illustrator file to be much more comprehensive, both for concept work and for multi-page/screen projects.
  • Integration with other Creative Cloud products is increasingly seamless.
  • Size limits on file dimensions is very frustrating for large-scale projects. The inability to work on a single 20ft event graphic or sign at actual size, let alone multiple concepts, forces inefficient workarounds.
  • Perhaps as much a criticism of the PDF file format, Illustrator cannot open more than one page of most PDFs. Being able to open multiple or all pages of a PDF in multiple artboards would be useful.
  • Snap to grid, pixel, and point still often feel imprecise or unpredictable years after their introduction as tools.
  • I can't imagine the negative impact of NOT having Illustrator for my team's work. Our full company rebrand recently would have been impossible. With Illustrator, we were able to work through thousands of new logo, pattern, typography and illustration concepts in less than two months with a team of only 4 designers.
Illustrator is superior to other tools for vector graphics editing. While Photoshop and InDesign both have increasingly robust vector tools, Illustrator remains the standard. Sketch is outstanding for web design and UX design (and our company uses Sketch for those areas), but can't stack up to Illustrator for other standard design work.
Illustrator CC is an excellent tool for branding projects - often the only software needed for logos, brand patterns, illustrations, etc. While InDesign is better suited for longer documents, Illustrator is often perfect for cards, flyers and brochures. Its vector-based model makes it ideal for efficiently creating large graphics like trade show displays or billboards (until actual file dimensions need to exceed 200 inches).

Illustrator is a useful illustration tool (no surprise there!), but exclusive use of Illustrator can be limiting to creativity and more natural illustration styles. It is also a good tool for web mockups, although Sketch (and Adobe XD) is definitely stronger in that field now.