Illustrator

Overview

Illustrator is Adobe’s vector-graphics editor, launched in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh, which turned PostScript — previously a tool only programmers could use — into a drawing program for graphic designers (Fast Company). It was Adobe’s move from behind-the-scenes printer software into retail design software, and it outlasted its great rival FreeHand: after a twenty-year orbit in which FreeHand passed between Altsys, Aldus, Macromedia and Adobe itself, Adobe stopped updating FreeHand in 2007 and Illustrator remained (TidBITS). Its real-world story is therefore not a feature list but a standards story — how a printer language became a designer’s instrument, and how bundling decided a rivalry.

PostScript, made drawable

Adobe was founded in 1982 by Xerox PARC computer scientists Charles Geschke and John Warnock “to commercialize their ideas for electronic document production,” and its first product, PostScript, “was a computer language for describing printed pages that Adobe sold to printer manufacturers,” setting the stage for the desktop-publishing revolution (Knowledge at Wharton). Adobe’s font business then “moved the company into the retail software market,” and, Wharton records, “its software business expanded when the company developed Adobe Illustrator, a drawing program to allow graphic artists to take advantage of PostScript’s rich imaging features” (Knowledge at Wharton).

Fast Company captures what that meant in practice. Before Illustrator, graphic design was “a tedious, meticulous analog process: it could take a day to set one page of type, and then maybe a temperamental Rapidograph pen would explode ink all over the page,” with physical cutting and pasting done with actual scissors (Fast Company). “With the launch of Adobe Illustrator in 1987, ‘it was like magic,’” designer Ron Chan said (Fast Company). The breakthrough was accessibility: prior to Illustrator there was PostScript, a software Warnock developed in the mid-1980s, and “you could have any size type. You could squash it and stretch it. It could deal with images and graphics,” Warnock said — “but PostScript could only be used by programmers” (Fast Company). “Warnock and his team began evolving a new version of the software with designers in mind. Illustrator required no coding to make drawings” (Fast Company).

Warnock proved the point with a rose: “When Illustrator went into beta, I wanted to do a drawing that would express something you absolutely couldn’t program,” he said. “I drew on a piece of tracing paper a picture of a rose, but then executed it in Illustrator. When people saw that this was the kind of thing that you could do with Illustrator, they just went bonkers” (Fast Company). Sceptics remained — professionals had to abandon formal training and embrace a new way of working, and some questioned whether digital lines would be as sharp as their Rapidographs (Fast Company). Warnock gave sceptics personal training, “among them were artists like David Hockney, art editors at publications like Time and Life,” and Fast Company notes that, by its account, “every infographic at Time Magazine is being done in Illustrator” (Fast Company).

Michigan Engineering places Illustrator in the desktop-publishing chain that made Photoshop possible: PostScript enabled complex page layouts, PageMaker provided a way to create them, and “Adobe Illustrator made it possible to create illustrations for those layouts” (University of Michigan Engineering). Wharton completes the pairing: alongside Illustrator, “Photoshop, another imaging program for editing photographs and other ‘bit-mapped’ images, was licensed from brothers Thomas and John Knoll in 1988” (Knowledge at Wharton).

The FreeHand wars and why Illustrator won

Illustrator’s rival for most of its early life was FreeHand, and TidBITS’ 2007 farewell to that program is the best-documented account of the rivalry. “Originally created by Altsys, FreeHand was the main competitor for Adobe’s Illustrator,” TidBITS writes, and “Aldus snapped up FreeHand from Altsys so that it could complement its page-layout application PageMaker, and eventually, in 1994, Adobe bought Aldus” (TidBITS). That merger left FreeHand awkwardly placed, and it “then passed back to Altsys (which allowed Adobe to avoid any antitrust issues involving owning the two dominant illustration programs on the market), which was sold to Macromedia” (TidBITS). “Ultimately, in 2005, FreeHand found itself once again at Adobe’s door when Adobe acquired Macromedia” (TidBITS) — an acquisition Wharton also records, with then-CEO Bruce Chizen naming “Flash” as its one-word motivation (Knowledge at Wharton).

The two programs, TidBITS stresses, were genuinely close rivals: “Both programs did roughly the same thing — drawing vector artwork — with mostly similar feature sets that occasionally leap-frogged each other” (TidBITS). So why did Illustrator outlast FreeHand? TidBITS’ answer is bundling, not features: “When Adobe began bundling Illustrator as part of the Creative Suite (which included Photoshop, InDesign, and GoLive at the time), it was hard for designers to justify paying for a separate application that did the same thing,” and “the interoperability among the Adobe programs gave Illustrator a further competitive edge” (TidBITS). In May 2007, Adobe’s senior Photoshop product manager confirmed FreeHand “is no longer being updated,” and TidBITS concluded: “It’s an Adobe Illustrator world, it has been for quite some time, and now the company is making it official” (TidBITS). Adobe encouraged FreeHand users to move to Illustrator with a $200 upgrade to Illustrator CS3 and switching resources (TidBITS).

What this profile does not claim

This profile dates Illustrator’s launch to 1987 only; a specific month comes from tertiary version tables, not from a source read in full, and is not asserted. It does not claim Illustrator was Adobe’s first software product overall — PostScript preceded it — only that it was Adobe’s expansion from printer software into retail design software, as Wharton describes it. It does not cover Illustrator’s later Creative Cloud, iPad or AI history, and it does not present the FreeHand rivalry as decided on technical merit alone: the sourced explanation is bundling and interoperability, not a feature verdict.