Adobe Illustrator 2021 System Requirements
Minimum
- Intel Pentium 4 or AMD Athlon 64 processor
- Microsoft Windows 7 with Service Pack 1, Windows 8, Windows 8.1, or Windows 10
- 1 GB of RAM (3 GB recommended) for 32 bit; 2 GB of RAM (8 GB recommended) for 64 bit
- 2 GB of available hard-disk space for installation; additional free space required during installation (cannot install on removable flash storage devices)
- 1024 x 768 display (1280 x 800 recommended)
- To view Illustrator in HiDPI mode, your monitor must support a resolution of 1920 x 1080 or more. For more information, see Enhanced Windows Support: HiDPI devices.
- OpenGL 4.x
- To use the new Touch workspace in Illustrator, you must have a touch screen enabled tablet/monitor running Windows 8.1. (Microsoft Surface Pro 3 recommended).
- Optional: To use GPU Performance: (NVIDIA video adapter listed below (medium/high-end recommended); 1 GB of VRAM (2 GB recommended); and latest drivers for optimal performance
Adobe Illustrator 2021 Application Details
Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor and design program developed and marketed by Adobe Inc. Originally designed for the Apple Macintosh, development of Adobe Illustrator began in 1985. Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe’s shift to monthly or annual subscription service delivered over the Internet), Illustrator CC was released. The latest version, Illustrator 2022, was released on October 26, 2021, and is the 25th generation in the product line. Adobe Illustrator was reviewed as the best vector graphics editing program in 2018 by PC Magazine.
Tools
A sidebar that appears at the left of the screen with a variety of tools to select, create, and manipulate objects or artworks in Illustrator. These tools can be selected as following: drawing, typing, painting, reshaping, slicing and cutting, symbolism, moving and zooming, and graph. Some tools have a small triangle at the bottom right of the toolbox icon. A small triangle has the option to view or expand some hidden tools by holding down the mouse button on the triangle.
Some examples of basic tools in Illustrator are selection tools, paintbrush tools, pen tools, pencil tools e.g. Selection tools are used to the layout, adjust, and organize the artwork by selecting, positioning, and stacking objects accurately. Moreover, selection tools can group, lock or hide, and measure objects. Paintbrush tools can be used to modify the appearance of the artwork. There are different types of brushes: calligraphic, scatter, art, pattern, and bristle. Pen tools create straight and curved lines for the artwork and they can add anchor points to paths and delete from paths. Pencil tools allow the user to draw and edit freehand lines.
Understand what the drawing tools create
All of the drawing tools create paths. Paths come in the form of a closed path like a square or circle, or an open path like a line. All paths—closed or open—are made up of anchor points, which control the direction and shape of the path, and line segments (or paths) that connect those anchor points.
Paintbrush tool
The Paintbrush tool, similar to the Pencil tool, is for creating more free-form paths. The great thing about the Paintbrush tool is that you can select a brush, like a calligraphy brush or texture, that is applied to the path you draw.
Blob Brush tool
The Blob Brush tool, found by pressing the Paintbrush tool in the Toolbar, is for creating filled, compound paths. New shapes painted with the Blob Brush tool will merge with existing shapes with the same appearance settings.
Pencil tool
The Pencil tool, found by pressing the Paintbrush tool in the Toolbar, is for creating more free-form paths—similar to drawing on paper with a pencil.
Curvature tool
The Curvature tool is a more intuitive drawing tool that gives you the ability to create paths with a good deal of precision without switching tools. With the Curvature tool, you focus on adding, editing, and removing anchor points to control the look of a path.
Pen tool
The most powerful drawing tool found in Illustrator is the Pen tool. With the Pen tool, you can create and precisely edit anchor points to make paths.
Adobe Illustrator 2021 Features
Adobe Illustrator is a software application for creating drawings, illustrations, and artwork using a Windows or MacOS computer. Illustrator was initially released in 1987 and it continues to be updated at regular intervals, and is now included as part of the Adobe Creative Cloud. Illustrator is widely used by graphic designers, web designers, visual artists, and professional illustrators throughout the world to create high quality artwork. Illustrator includes many sophisticated drawing tools that can reduce the time need to create illustrations.
How Adobe Illustrator is Used
Adobe Illustrator is used to create a variety of digital and printed images, including cartoons, charts, diagrams, graphs, logos, and illustrations. Illustrator allows a user to import a photograph and use it as a guide to trace an object in the photograph. This can be used to re-color or create a sketch-like appearance of a photograph. Illustrator also makes it possible to manipulate text in many ways, making Illustrator a useful tool for creating postcards, posters, and other visual designs which use text and images together. Illustrator’s ability to place text around a curve is especially useful for artists creating logos. Illustrator is also used in designing mock-ups which show what the website will look like when it’s completed, and creating icons used within apps or websites.
Illustrator and the Creative Cloud
Illustrator is included with Adobe Creative Cloud subscriptions but can also be licensed independently. Because it is part of the Creative Cloud artwork from Illustrator can be shared with other Adobe Creative Cloud applications including After Effects, InDesign, Photoshop and Premiere Pro. For example, users often create an initial piece of artwork in Illustrator and then import the artwork into Photoshop or After Effects. Illustrator user can also create an image and export it to InDesign to include it within a book or magazine. Users also export an Illustrator image to After Effects to create an animation of the image. Similarly, artwork can be imported from Photoshop into Illustrator, where a final design can be assembled, mixing text, illustrations, and the imported image.
Vector Graphics in Adobe Illustrator
One of Adobe Illustrator’s most important features is that the quality of artwork created using Illustrator is independent of the resolution at which it is displayed. This means that an image created in Illustrator can be enlarged or reduced without sacrificing image quality. This is an attribute of vector artwork, which uses mathematical relationships in describing lines, arcs, and other parts of an illustrator. By comparison, photographs edited using tools such as Adobe Photoshop are resolution-dependent, and image quality decreases when an image is enlarged. A vector graphic is a set of polygons that make up the image, which are in turn composed of vectors. Each vector passes through a location known as a node or control point, which has a defined location on the x and y axes on a plane. This node determines the vector’s path, which has various attributes such as color, curve, fill, shape and thickness. The position of vectors can be related to each other by mathematical formulas, which precisely recalculate their position when an image is resized.
This property of vector graphics is different when compared to imaging software such as Photoshop, which uses pixel grids to render images. When this type of image is scaled up sufficiently, the individual pixels comprising a bit map become visible. This phenomenon results in a loss of image quality known as pixilation, which makes Illustrator especially advantageous for creating large images such as a billboard sign.
What is Illustrator CC?
Illustrator CC is the version of Illustrator that’s available through Creative Cloud, which is Adobe’s cloud-based subscription service. The first version of Illustrator CC was Illustrator v17, which was released in 2013. Since then, each version of Illustrator CC has generally been designated as Illustrator CC xxxx, where “xxxx” is the year of release. The current version is Illustrator CC 2020.
The most noticeable changes in Illustrator CC include the ability to synch and save documents to the cloud. Illustrator CC can also integrate with Behance, which is used by artists to showcase their work and portfolios. Illustrator CC also made changes to Illustrator’s handing of fonts, and the ability sync and save color settings. Modern versions of Illustrator CC have added capabilities to use touchscreen-compatible tools as well as create and save customized brushes.
File Formats Illustrator can Save
Illustrator’s ability to create and modify vector images means that must also save files in vector graphics formats. Some of these formats include Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), Portable Document Format (PDF), Encapsulated PostScript (EPS), Windows Metafile (WMF) and Vector Markup Language (VML), which are detailed below:
- PDF is a file format that Illustrator can export. It allows for images and text to display independently of hardware, software and OS. It encapsulates a complete description of flat documents with a fixed layout, including fonts, graphics and text. The PDF format includes a structured storage system that combines these elements and compresses them into a single file. It also includes a subset of PostScript to generate the graphics and a system for associating fonts with the documents.
- EPS is a subset of the PostScript format with additional restrictions that allow it to store graphics files. These files are generally self-contained and may be placed within another PostScript file. An EPS file is essentially a PostScript program that contains a low-resolution preview of the image, which some applications are able to display. Earlier in its history, it was common to save Illustrator files into an EPS format for them to be shared with page layout applications.
- WMF is a format that was originally used by Windows in the 1990s for which Illustrator could export. This format can store both vector graphics and bitmaps, allowing it to be used in a manner similar to the SVG format. WMF files contain a list of function calls that the Windows Graphics Device Interface (GDI) uses to display an image. A WMF can include executable code since some GDI functions perform error handling.
- VML This was an XML-based format for two-dimensional vector graphics that was part of the Office Open XML standards. It’s no longer supported by Internet Explorer as of 2012, although it’s still included in Office Open XML for legacy purposes, and was originally supported by Illustrator.
- SVG The SVG specification has been maintained by the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) as an open standard since 1999. This format is based on Extended Markup Language (XML), which supports two-dimensional graphics for both animations and interactive images. SVG images are defined in XML files, allowing them to be compressed, indexed, scripted and searched. SVG files may be edited with any text editor and many other drawing applications. As a member of the W3C, Adobe supports this file format in Illustrator and other applications they produce.
Adobe Illustrator 2021 Download Files
- Adobe Illustrator – APPLICATION ⚙️ ( 1.6 GB )
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