40 Fun Facts About Adobe Illustrator

Which Renaissance painter's Venus provided the face used on Adobe Illustrator's early packaging and splash screens?

Botticelli's The Birth of Venus was licensed from the Bettmann Archive, and her flowing hair was picked to show how well the program could follow smooth curves.

Adobe, the company behind Illustrator, takes its name from what feature behind a co-founder's California home?

A creek called Adobe Creek runs through Los Altos, California, behind the house of one of the two men who founded the company in December 1982.

The smooth curves that make up Illustrator paths are named after which French engineer, who popularized them at Renault?

Pierre Bézier began a 42-year career at Renault as a tool setter. The curves that carry his name were in fact first developed in 1959 by Paul de Casteljau.

Adobe's 2007 suite gave its apps periodic-table-style icons; Illustrator's white letters sat on which background color?

Orange and yellow had featured in Illustrator's branding as far back as version 4.0, a Windows release of 1992.

Adobe Illustrator was originally designed for which computer, two years before a Windows version first appeared?

Apple Macintosh users had Illustrator from 1987; the first Windows edition, version 2.0, arrived in 1989 and flopped.

Which software pioneer created Illustrator to automate the manual tasks of his wife Marva, a graphic designer?

John Warnock was Adobe's co-founder and chief executive when he created the program. Marva, the designer he built it for, also drew the company's logo.

Which file extension does Adobe Illustrator give documents saved in its own native Artwork format?

The .ai extension belongs to Adobe Illustrator Artwork, Adobe's own proprietary format. The program also treats PDF and EPS as native formats, because both can keep all of its editing data.

Which Illustrator tool, chosen by pressing P, draws precise lines and curves using anchor points and direction handles?

Pen clicks create anchor points joined by straight segments; dragging instead pulls out direction lines that set the slope of a curve.

Holding down which key temporarily turns the current Illustrator tool into the Hand tool for dragging the view around?

Spacebar summons the Hand tool for as long as it is held, though not while text is being edited. Pressing H picks the same tool until another is chosen.

Which Illustrator feature, with presets such as High Color and Auto-Color, turns JPEG or PNG files into vectors?

Image Trace took over from the older Live Trace feature in Illustrator CS6. In its Black and White mode, a threshold decides which pixels turn white and which turn black.

Illustrator 7 reworked its interface in 1997 to match which Adobe raster editor, described as its companion product?

Photoshop is geared to photo manipulation, while Illustrator handles logos and typesetting. The 1997 redesign changed path editing so much that many users chose not to upgrade.

Which Illustrator rival comes from an Ottawa company that was once the biggest software firm in Canada?

CorelDRAW launched in 1989 and became the most popular illustration package on Windows. Its maker's name abbreviates Cowpland Research Laboratory, after founder Michael Cowpland.

Illustrator's seventeenth version, released in 2013, was the first sold only through which Adobe subscription service?

Creative Cloud replaced one-off purchases with a monthly or annual fee, and it brought syncing of fonts, colors and program settings between computers.

Which Illustrator tool, chosen by pressing A, picks out individual anchor points and path segments for reshaping?

Direct Selection reaches inside an object to move a single point or segment, whereas the plain Selection tool, on the V key, moves and resizes whole objects.

Which Illustrator tool, on the I key, picks up a color from one object so it can be applied to another?

Eyedropper can also sample a shade from a placed photo or from partway along a gradient, not only from flat-colored objects.

Which Illustrator tool, on the Y key, selects every object that shares an attribute such as color or opacity?

Magic Wand can also match objects by stroke weight or stroke color, and a tolerance value sets how similar an object must be to get picked.

In Illustrator, what name is given to each sheet-like area that holds a design, several of which can share one document?

Artboard number 1 stays put if you try to delete them all, because every document must keep at least one. Putting several in a single file only became possible with CS4 in 2008.

What does Illustrator call an object that hides artwork outside its shape and loses its own fill and stroke?

Clipping mask and the artwork it trims are together called a clipping set, made in one step with the shortcut Ctrl+7 (Command+7 on macOS).

Which color mode, based on the light-absorbing quality of ink, suits Illustrator documents bound for a printing press?

CMYK describes each color as percentages of cyan, magenta, yellow and black ink, so a bright red might be 2% cyan, 93% magenta, 90% yellow and no black at all.

Holding which key while dragging Illustrator's Ellipse tool forces the shape into a perfect circle?

Shift also turns a dragged rectangle into a square and limits straight lines to 45-degree steps.

Illustrator was Adobe's second product, following which page description language used by the LaserWriter printer?

PostScript came first, and Illustrator grew out of the in-house software that Adobe had been using to develop fonts for it.

Which Illustrator rival did Adobe acquire along with Macromedia in 2005, only to stop developing it two years later?

FreeHand had slipped away from Adobe once before: after Adobe bought Aldus in 1994, the Federal Trade Commission ordered the program divested to protect competition.

Adobe, maker of Illustrator, was founded in 1982 by two researchers who had just left which famous research lab?

Xerox PARC managers would not commercialize InterPress, a language for controlling printers, so the two men behind it quit to build a version of their own.

Which Illustrator tool, introduced with CS5 in 2010, creates complex forms by merging and erasing simpler objects?

Shape Builder merges regions as the pointer is dragged across them, and holding Alt or Option flips it into an erase mode that deletes them instead.

Which Illustrator painting tool, added in CS4, makes filled shapes that merge with touching shapes of the same color?

Blob Brush makes paths with a fill and no stroke, the reverse of a calligraphic brush, which leaves a stroke and no fill.

Which Illustrator tool, on the W key, fills the gap between two objects with evenly spaced in-between shapes?

Blend results stay live: move or edit either of the two originals and the shapes in between redraw to match, because they have no anchor points of their own.

Which Illustrator tool, on the C key, splits a path in two at an anchor point or along a segment?

Scissors cuts only at the spot clicked, while the related Knife tool carves through whole objects along a hand-drawn line.

Which Illustrator panel combines overlapping objects into new shapes with buttons such as Divide, Trim, Merge and Crop?

Pathfinder changes are permanent: once one of its bottom-row buttons is clicked, the original objects can no longer be edited separately.

Which Illustrator text tool sets lettering along the outline of any drawn shape, where it can then be moved or flipped?

Type on a Path can also be triggered by accident: clicking an existing object with the ordinary Type tool converts it to hold text along its edge or inside it.

Which Illustrator Character panel setting, defaulting to 120% of the type size, sets the space between lines of text?

Leading rhymes with sledding: the name comes from the thin strips of lead that hand typesetters slid between lines of metal type.

In Illustrator print setup, what is the term for artwork that extends past the trim marks as a margin of error?

Bleed guarantees that ink still runs to the very edge of the page once the sheet has been trimmed, even if the cut lands slightly off.

Which XML-based vector format, an open web standard developed by the W3C, can Illustrator save as a native format?

SVG stores a drawing as text. The W3C began work on it after six rival proposals arrived in 1998, one of them a language called PGML that Adobe had backed.

Which free, open-source vector editor began in 2003 as a fork of Sodipodi and can import Illustrator's own file format?

Inkscape was started by four former Sodipodi developers who disagreed with that project's goals and its openness to outside contributions.

Illustrator's Text to Vector Graphic feature, which draws art from a typed prompt, launched on which Adobe model family?

Firefly is Adobe's family of generative AI models. It was unveiled as a beta in March 2023, when its first model could make only images and text effects.

Which Illustrator tool, on the U key, lays a grid of lines over an object so colors can flow in different directions?

Mesh points appear as diamonds where the grid lines cross, and each one can take its own color, so shading spreads smoothly from point to point.

Which Illustrator tool, added in 2017, lets pins be dropped onto artwork and dragged to twist and bend parts of it?

Puppet Warp places some pins automatically, choosing the spots it judges best, and each pin holds its surroundings still while another is dragged.

Which Illustrator tool adds many identical objects at once, with companions named Scruncher, Spinner and Stainer?

Symbol Sprayer works like a particle sprayer, and because every copy is an instance of one stored master, reusing artwork this way keeps the file small.

Which Illustrator gradient type, joining Linear and Radial in 2018, lets color stops be placed anywhere inside a shape?

Freeform gradients can be applied only to an object's fill, whereas the two older types also work on its stroke.

What does Illustrator call two or more outlines combined so that holes appear where they overlap, as in a doughnut?

Compound path components all take on the paint and style of the backmost object, and from then on the set behaves like a group.

Which Illustrator tool makes a stroke thicker or thinner at chosen points, a variation that can be saved as a profile?

Width shows a hollow diamond with handles when the pointer passes over a stroke; dragging the handles changes the thickness at that point.