January 28, 2008

Back to the Future with Illustrator 88

Pass the banana clips and fire up Less Than Zero: It's time to visit the late 80's with the promotional video for Adobe Illustrator 88.  It's fun to see all that was possible even then, and to hear that the marketing message of "do more, and more easily, so you can focus on being creative" is eternal.  Now I shudder at visions of a besweatered James Spader dropping the French curves and grabbing a mouse.  [Via]

The timing is kind of spooky: for nearly a year I've been meaning to upload a copy of the John Warnock-hosted VHS tape that shipped in the Illustrator 1.0 box, and just last week I got serious about doing so.  Of the work Dr. Warnock says, "That video demo tape was shot live, with no editing. We didn't have video production tools at that time, and we didn’t want to pay for a professional to do it, so I did the demonstration."  Pretty cool that the company co-founder and CEO was not only one of four names on the product splash screen, but also the main demo man.  ("Everyone sweeps the floor around here," said Chuck Geschke of that time.)

This posting lights a fire under me, so look for the Warnock video soon. [Interim bonus retro fun: the 1987 Apple Knowledge Navigator video. Everything old is new again, and self-serious yuppies will always be with us.]

Posted by John Nack at 08:53 AM on January 28, 2008

Comments

patrik — 01:50 PM on January 28, 2008

I got through about 30 seconds of that Adobe Illustrator 88 video before the Blade Runner/Vangelis-like soundtrack started melting my brain.

[Better not watch that skate video I mentioned, then. ;-) --J.]

Oh wait, MUTE. Ahh, there we go.

Vectorpedia(Rick) — 09:57 AM on January 30, 2008

It was certainly interesting to view the promo for Adobe Illustrator 88........looks like a lot of creative people working on this project.

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