Adobe Illustrator Review: A Designer‘s Perspective

As a professional graphic designer, Adobe Illustrator is one of the most important tools in my creative arsenal. For over two decades, this powerful vector graphics editor has enabled me to create logos, illustrations, page layouts, website mockups and so much more. It‘s an industry-standard program—but is it still the best option for designers in 2023?

In this in-depth review, I‘ll share my thoughts on Illustrator‘s strengths, weaknesses, and overall value based on many years of experience. Whether you‘re a design student, hobbyist, or working professional, I hope this provides a helpful perspective as you evaluate your software needs and options.

First Impressions & Ease of Use

Illustrator definitely has a steeper learning curve compared to more basic graphics programs. The sheer number of tools and panels can be intimidating at first glance, even with the friendly welcome screen offering links to tutorials.

However, Illustrator‘s interface is quite logically laid out once you understand the essentials. Your main toolbar lives on the left, with the important selection, shape, pen, and type tools within easy reach. The properties panel at the top allows you to quickly adjust attributes of your currently selected object. And additional panels for appearance, layers, color swatches, etc. are stacked along the right.

Everything is customizable, so you can set up your workspace to put the tools you use most often at your fingertips. Illustrator also comes with a variety of pre-configured workspaces tailored for different uses like typography, web design, or printing and proofing.

While it‘s not exactly intuitive, Illustrator‘s interface is very learnable with some practice and guidance. Adobe provides extensive documentation and tutorials, and there are countless third-party resources available online as well. The effort you invest in mastering Illustrator is well worth it to unlock its full potential.

Essential Drawing Tools

At its core, Illustrator is all about creating and editing vector shapes. The pen tool is your primary instrument for drawing precise paths, while various shape tools allow you to quickly insert pre-defined shapes like rectangles, circles, polygons and stars.

Illustrator‘s "smart guides" are extremely helpful when aligning and distributing objects. Just drag shapes close together and smart guides appear to help you line them up perfectly. The more you use Illustrator, the more you appreciate how much time this saves versus fiddling with manual positioning.

The curvature and pencil tools provide alternative methods for drawing freeform vector paths. With the pencil tool, you can simply click and drag to sketch, and Illustrator will translate your strokes into clean vector curves. It takes practice to master, but is a great option for more organic, hand-drawn styles.

Illustrator also includes a full set of transformative tools to help turn your basic shapes into more complex forms. The rotate, reflect, scale, and shear tools allow you to create infinite variations on your paths. The shape builder and pathfinder features let you combine and intersect multiple shapes together into new combinations.

With the addition of gradients, patterns, variable-width strokes, and tons of other stylistic effects, Illustrator provides immense creative freedom to build unique artwork from these foundational drawing tools.

Type & Layout Capabilities

In addition to its drawing chops, Illustrator also shines as a typography and page layout program for single page documents. While it doesn‘t offer the multi-page and master template features of InDesign, Illustrator is my go-to for one-off designs like posters, flyers, and social media graphics.

Illustrator‘s type tool is full-featured, supporting multiple columns, spacing and alignment options, and text on a path. You can convert type to outlines for further manipulation, or keep your text editable with crisp, vector-based rendering. All the major OpenType features like ligatures and alternate glyphs are available too.

When it comes to layout, Illustrator has you covered with grids, guides, and measuring tools to help organize your design. You can group related elements together to move them as a unit, and lock objects to avoid accidentally nudging them out of place. The layers panel helps track different components of complex artwork.

Illustrator‘s layout chops really shine when combined with its drawing tools. Being able to freely mix vector graphics and formatted type together on the same canvas is a recipe for design excellence. And Illustrator files can be easily shared with InDesign for integration into larger multi-page documents.

Creative Cloud Integration

For many designers, one of the biggest draws of Illustrator is its position at the center of Adobe‘s Creative Cloud ecosystem. Illustrator plays very nicely with its sister apps like Photoshop, InDesign, After Effects, and XD.

Assets can be easily passed back and forth between programs. For example, you can copy paths from Illustrator and paste them into Photoshop as shape layers, or place an Illustrator graphic into an InDesign page layout. Illustrator also supports linked files, so if you update a logo in Illustrator, that change will automatically flow through to any InDesign documents using that asset.

Creative Cloud libraries provide a central place to store frequently-used assets like logos, colors, and images for easy access across apps and devices. Your Illustrator files are always available in the cloud as well.

Illustrator also connects to some of Adobe‘s newer design apps like Adobe Capture, which allows you to take a photo with your phone and convert it into a vector graphic. Or Adobe Fresco, which provides a more natural painting and drawing experience on tablet devices that can then be brought into Illustrator for further editing.

Price & Value

Of course, all this functionality comes at a cost. Illustrator is only available via subscription to Adobe‘s Creative Cloud, either as a single app subscription or as part of the complete Creative Cloud suite. As of this writing, a standalone Illustrator subscription runs $20.99/month with an annual commitment, or $31.49/month on a month-to-month basis.

For professional designers who use multiple Creative Cloud apps, the full suite subscription is a better value at $52.99/month since it includes access to over 20 apps including Photoshop, InDesign, and more. Still, this can be a significant expense for freelancers or small studios on a tight budget.

Adobe does offer discounts for students, teachers, and schools at $19.99/month for the first year. But there‘s no denying Illustrator carries a premium price tag compared to some of the alternatives on the market.

The Competition

While Adobe Illustrator is still the 800-pound gorilla in the vector graphics space, there are some solid alternatives at lower price points:

• Affinity Designer – For a one-time price of $54.99, Affinity Designer provides a very capable alternative to Illustrator for Mac and Windows, as well as iPad. It has a similar vector-based drawing toolset with good typography controls as well.
• CorelDRAW – Corel has been in the graphics game a long time and still offers its flagship CorelDRAW program for a one-time price of $669, or as a subscription for $16.50/month. It‘s a highly capable option for designers who don‘t need the full Creative Cloud ecosystem.
• Inkscape – On the free and open source side, Inkscape provides a surprisingly full-featured vector drawing program for Mac, Windows and Linux. Its interface isn‘t quite as polished as the commercial alternatives, but it‘s hard to argue with the price.

These programs can certainly handle professional-level work, with some limitations. The trade-off is you lose out on the tight integration and shared resources Illustrator enjoys with the rest of the Creative Cloud family.

Room for Improvement

While Illustrator is extremely powerful, it‘s not perfect. A few areas where I think it could still improve:

• Touch/Tablet Optimization – With more designers using tablets and touch-enabled devices, Illustrator‘s interface could use some further optimization for touch input and pen sensitivity. Features like Adobe Fresco are a step in the right direction, but the core Illustrator app still feels designed for mouse and keyboard first.
• Collaboration – While you can share Illustrator files and libraries with colleagues, true real-time collaboration is still lacking. It would be great to be able to work on the same document simultaneously with teammates, seeing their edits live. This is an area where some online challengers like Figma are really innovating.
• 3D & Animation – Illustrator has dipped its toes into 3D and animation effects in recent updates, but these still feel bolted on compared to the core 2D capabilities. As design trends move towards more immersive animated experiences, it would be great to see Adobe investing in making Illustrator a more robust motion design tool as well.

Of course, Adobe has to balance not overcrowding Illustrator with features better suited for its other apps like After Effects or Dimension. But as a designer, I‘d love to be able to do more of my workflow in one place.

The Verdict

Despite some room for improvement, Adobe Illustrator is still the king of the vector graphics hill in 2023. Its robust and time-tested drawing tools, typographic controls, and layout capabilities make it an essential part of many designers‘ software tool belts, including my own.

That said, it‘s not the only option, and the subscription-only model and premium price won‘t be the right fit for everyone. Designers who are just starting out or have more limited needs may find a less expensive (or even free) alternative suits them just fine.

But for professional illustrators and graphic designers who need access to the full power of a mature, industry-standard vector drawing program, Illustrator remains tough to beat. And when you factor in its integration with the rest of Adobe‘s Creative Cloud ecosystem, it becomes even more appealing for many designers who are already working across mediums.

Final Rating: 4.5/5 stars

Powerful, flexible, and deeply integrated with other industry-standard design apps, Adobe Illustrator is still the go-to choice for professional vector graphics work. But it carries a premium price tag and definite learning curve that might put off more casual users.