Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator Review: The Vector Design Standard Since 1987

Adobe Illustrator has been the professional vector graphics tool for 37 years — a record of longevity in software that reflects genuinely durable category leadership. While Figma has displaced Illustrator for screen design workflows and Affinity Designer has attracted cost-sensitive users, Illustrator remains the definitive standard for logo design, brand identity, editorial illustration, and print production.

Why Vector Matters

Vector graphics are defined mathematically rather than as a grid of pixels. A circle in Illustrator is stored as its centre point, radius, stroke weight, and fill colour — not as an array of coloured pixels. This means the same artwork file produces a crisp result at business card size, banner size, and billboard size without quality loss or jagged edges.

For brand identity work — where a logo must render clearly on a 16×16 pixel favicon, a 1080×1080 pixel social post, an A3 print brochure, and a 10-metre trade show banner simultaneously — this scalability is not optional. Raster tools like Photoshop cannot produce this behaviour; Illustrator's vector output is the only professional solution.

Core Toolset

Illustrator's Pen tool is the most important and most feared feature in professional design software. Clicking and dragging creates bezier curves with direction handles that control the path's curvature. Mastering bezier manipulation is the fundamental skill divide between beginner and professional vector designers — and it takes sustained practice. The payoff is precise path control that no automated tracing or shape tool can replicate for complex custom artwork.

The Shape Builder tool allows intuitive combination and subtraction of overlapping shapes by simply dragging across them — a significant usability improvement over the Pathfinder panel operations it partially replaced. Live Paint enables colour fills in enclosed areas created by overlapping paths, working more intuitively than traditional fill-and-stroke assignments for complex illustrations.

The Pen tool ecosystem — anchored by bezier paths, expanded through shape operations, and refined through typography tools — makes Illustrator the standard for logotype creation, where precise letterform modification requires vector-level control.

AI-Powered Additions

Illustrator's recent Firefly AI integrations include Text-to-Vector Graphic (generating vector artwork from a text prompt, available as editable vector paths — not rasterised) and Generative Recolour (suggesting colour palette variations for an illustration using AI). For concept exploration and colour direction, these tools accelerate early ideation without replacing the precision craft required for final production artwork.

Ecosystem Integration

Illustrator's Creative Cloud integration means assets created in Illustrator flow directly into InDesign for layout, After Effects for animation, and Premiere Pro for motion graphics. Shared libraries maintain brand colour swatches, character styles, and graphic assets across the entire creative team. For production environments where the same brand assets appear across print, video, and digital channels, this integration eliminates the manual asset management overhead of multi-tool stacks.

Versus Affinity Designer

Affinity Designer ($69.99 one-time) covers approximately 80–85% of Illustrator's use cases at a fraction of the cost, and is the first credible alternative for designers whose work does not require the full Illustrator feature set or the Creative Cloud ecosystem. For designers working primarily in screen design, logo design, and digital illustration, Affinity Designer deserves serious evaluation before defaulting to Illustrator.

Verdict

For brand identity, print production, editorial illustration, and any work requiring industry-standard AI files, Illustrator is still the professional requirement. For budget-conscious designers whose work stays primarily digital, Affinity Designer is a credible alternative worth evaluating.

Score: 8.8/10 — Unmatched vector toolset and industry standard format; subscription cost and Pen tool learning curve are the trade-offs.