Adobe Illustrator 2023 Free Download For Windows 11 v28.0 (x64)

CONS of Adobe Illustrator 

• No perpetual license option
• No uniformity of key commands with Photoshop and InDesign

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By default, Adobe Illustrator shows five selection tools, each designed to choose specific types of objects, groups, paths, and points. You can get even more precise control via the Preferences menu. A dream come true for hard-working eyeballs is the preference addition of custom sizing for anchor points and handles. Until now, no matter how high you magnified your view, the anchor points remained painfully small.

A related feature that arrived in the November 2019 update is the Object > Path > Simplify tool. This tool removes unnecessary anchor points, which is especially important for paths created by tracing or with mobile apps. The tool keeps the path the same as it does its job, and you can adjust the number of anchor points with the Reduce Anchor Point Slider. Getting even further into the weeds, you can open the Simplify dialogue to specify the Corner Point Angle Threshold.

The program’s 18 drawing tools are sure to satisfy. Among them is the invaluable Pixel Perfect tool which aids in creating crisp web-destined graphics with pixels that align along a grid. The Puppet Warp tool gives you a way to make minor adjustments without having to select many points and move each one separately. The tool allows for more holistic complex-shape editing by creating a triangulated mesh envelope around your selection that allows you to lock certain zones while manipulating adjacent areas, rather than having to do so point by point.

Working with complex typography is a pleasure in Illustrator with six type tools, including the revolutionary Touch Type tool. Touch Type allows the repositioning, rotation, and scaling of individual letters within live text blocks. Now typographers can assign OpenType alternate styles to a text block.

Artists will enjoy playing with eight paint tools, including the Live Paint tool, which lets users color fill shapes simply by clicking in them. The Brush tool allows you to create custom brushes (Pattern, Art, Scatter, Calligraphic or Bristle), a feature that becomes even more awesome when you realize that you can create unexpected shapes by replacing polygon and ellipse strokes with a custom brush.

Related to the paint tools is the delightful Symbol Sprayer tool with its seven variants. You can assign a symbol you created—let’s use a star for this example—to become the paint, and the tool sprays stars. With the Sprayer’s sub-tools you can control the density of spray, randomness, color variation, size variation, and individual rotation of the stars with the aptly named Styler, Shifter, Scruncher, Screener, Sizer, Spinner, and Stain tools.

Adobe Illustrator 2023 promises power. The reshaping and transformation tools feel quite satisfying as you manipulate your work in every way imaginable, like shape blending, morphing, warping, twisting, shearing, tweaking, puckering, and bloating. With five slicing and cutting tools, you get ultrafine control over lines and shapes with the Pathfinder tab, which performs operations like unite, exclude, intersect, merge, and divide. Try experimenting with these different functions.

Illustrator includes nine graphing tools.

Considering the popularity of data visualization and information graphics, Illustrator satisfies with nine graphing tools that allow you to get down to business. You can transform your data with an adequate variety of graph types, including bar and pie charts, but also scatter and radar charts. I’m eager to see if anyone comes up with scripts to help create unconventional graphs like tree maps, network diagrams, or bubble maps, which are more adept at displaying complex data.

Hottest Features for Work, Fun, and Experimentation

Precision Drawing. Illustrator was born for precision drawing more than for its other abilities. Amenities like perspective grids scaffold the foundation of perspective drawing and create dimensional lettering effects, while axonometric angle constraints save time and minimize frustration. Layers help organize and isolate components of your illustration for easy access when making edits or for variable overlays. Finally, although it takes a bit of practice to master, the Pen tool is your go-to for creating beautiful vector paths, Bezier curves, defining anchor points, and coaxing handles.

Copy and Paste and File Export. With so many potential asset destinations within each project, you only get the best final product if you supply the optimum file type to your colleagues and vendors. Of course, with other Creative Cloud apps on your desktop, you can copy and paste into and out of Illustrator, or even drag. But I enjoy being able to trust Illustrator’s wide range of file type conversions which include export for print, web, and mobile in formats such as AutoCAD, BMP, CSS, JPEG, PDF, PNG, SVG, TIFF, and more.

Type Wrangling. As a typographer, I find a lot to love when working with type in Illustrator, especially now that Adobe has integrated InDesign’s easy OpenType glyph chooser drop-down. You can now assign alternates to entire text blocks rather than having to assign glyphs one character at a time. All you do is highlight a character and select from the alternates options drop-down menu. For example, if you highlight the numeral 5 (depending on the typeface), you can choose from superscript, subscript, tabular, old style, denominator, numerator, case sensitive, small caps, and other alternates.

Illustrator also borrows from InDesign’s professional character and paragraph formatting options. The addition of Touch Type tool, described previously, a Glyphs window and support for Asian (horizontal and vertical), Indic, Arabic, and Hebrew languages makes working with type in Illustrator a stellar experience. Thankfully, the formerly anemic spellchecker has been revamped so that it’s now actually helpful.

Variable type resembles a smart build-out of Adobe’s Multiple Master technology of yore. Six typefaces in the OpenType variable format come preinstalled: Acumin, Minion, Myriad, Source code, Source Sans, and Source Serif. What’s great about variable fonts is that in Illustrator, you can precisely control width (condensed or extended), weight (thin to black) and slant with the software’s sliders. It’s like getting 30 fonts in one typeface. Something to note here is that the slant is an oblique, not a true italic.

Automation. Graphic Styles in Illustrator are akin to Photoshop’s Styles. They’re one-click mechanisms that automate the application of attributes to an object or type in a single step. In Illustrator, these attributes can be something as simple as a slight drop shadow or as complex as a seven-layer stroke with offsets, feathering and an inner glow. Note that in Illustrator, shadows and glows are made from stepped gradations of solid colors that simulate a blur.

A great way to understand building and using Graphic Styles is to select an object with a Graphic Style applied to it and examine the Appearance panel. There you will see each of the attribute layers that combine to generate the Graphic Style’s effect. To further automate your process, you can deploy a bounty of Photoshop-style Action presets or make your own.

In terms of convenience, automatically having assets wherever you need them is great. In Creative Cloud Libraries, users now have access to their palettes, styles, and even blocks of copy from whichever application they are using.

Libraries and Mobile Apps

Creative Cloud Libraries keep your project assets from desktop apps and mobile apps at your fingertips for easy integration between the apps. You also have the ability to keep handy often-used text blocks like taglines or disclaimers in your Libraries.

Share project assets with Libraries.

Integration with the iPad version and Adobe Illustrator 2023  mobile app cousins, including Fresco and Capture, is a treat. The latter iOS app is surprisingly simple to use and worth a serious look. For instance, you can be on the train to work and create a custom brush on your iPhone by taking a snap of anything interesting and let Capture do its magic. Once you get to work and open Illustrator on your desktop, that brush you made on the train awaits in your Creative Cloud Library, ready to use in any project.

Everyone benefits from a streamlined professional process. With Creative Cloud, collaboration with team members and clients is easy with shared and private assets and libraries.

A subscription also includes Adobe Fonts (previously Typekit), Adobe’s well-populated library of typeface families for print and web use. Just choose your fonts and sync them to your desktop (or grab code for your site). The only drawback here is that when you collect for output, Illustrator does not copy Adobe Fonts in the packaged folder. Your printer or service bureau must have a Creative Cloud subscription too. Of course, if you don’t have a type-heavy, multipage document, you can go ahead and convert type to outline to get around the problem.

In addition to the goodies above, with Creative Cloud for Teams, your enterprise gets a team website, premium fonts, 100GB of cloud storage for collaboration, dedicated 24/7 technical support, shared Adobe Stock plans, streamlined management, the ability to reassign licenses (fantastic for dynamic staffing), a web-based admin console, consolidated billing, and purchase orders. There are also targeted plans for students, teachers, schools, and universities.

Design Wish List

No software is perfect. Even the beloved Adobe Illustrator has some fans hoping for a variety of new or enhanced features. Here are some of my wishes for built-in features (a few of which are met by the plugins mentioned above):

• Numeric handle adjustments would be a nice touch, along with the ability to symmetrically synchronize movement of more than two-point handles.
• With the popularity of graphing big data, we’re seeing new and interesting new ways to visualize information. But big data requires the big computing power of algorithms. At the least, I’d like a tool with more sophisticated options for making inventive graphs and data images, like chord diagrams, network (node-link) diagrams, circle packing graphs, tree charts, and sunburst/radial column graphs.
• Uniform key commands across Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator would make life easier. And speaking of Photoshop, it would be great if Illustrator had a similar history panel that allowed you to hop back to a certain state (as does Affinity Designer).

Conclusion:

Adobe Illustrator 2023 v28.0 is the best vector-graphics editing program around, and it just keeps getting better. New feature arrivals include more collaboration options, integrated tutorials, and support for 3D assets.