2012 is an important year for Adobe Illustrator, marking 25 years since the software first shipped as version 1.1, March 19, 1987.

It’s hard to even remember the world of professional graphic design in 1987, where technical drawing pens, French curves, X-acto knives, and rubylith masking film were the tools of choice. It was a world where just printing a beautiful, smooth curve from a computer to a black-and-white printer was magic, and being able to use a desktop computer program, Adobe Illustrator 1.1, to actually create those shapes in a fully controlled way was pure freedom. read more…