MudHut 030

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Scribbled by your hero Luke Dorny circa October 10th, 2023 next to the food truck on Bainbridge Island and then saddled up.

This is an homage and farewell of sorts to the vector design software application known as Illustrator.

Birth of Venus by Botticelli — Public domain photograph of Botticelli’s *Birth of Venus* painting.
Sandro Botticelli, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons license.
Sandro Botticelli, The Birth of Venus (c. 1484–1486). Tempera on canvas. 172.5 cm × 278.9 cm (67.9 in × 109.6 in). Uffizi, Florence
By: Public Domain
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Venus_botticelli_detail.jpg

Career

Illustrator is my favorite art app. Always has been. Today version 28 was released by Adobe.

A frequent reference point in my digital design career has been reminding myself and others that one had to hold onto several floppy disks to install Adobe® Illustrator® onto a pre 1995 or so Macintosh.

Installation

“Please insert disk 11 of 20” or something to that effect. I searched briefly to see how many diskettes were involved, depending on the version history to no avail.

Adobe Illustrator diskette image — Illustrator® install diskette circa 1994.
“illustrator-v5.5-disk-1-installer-0199-7626-adobe-systems-inc.-may-1994-front”

One of the “oh-no-he’s-going-down-memory-lane” boring details about the install process of Applications back then was that if it read one of the floppy disks wrong, or, likely, simply a power flicker, this would interrupt the install process and you’d have to go back to diskette #1 to start over. It was a nervous dance.

Thankfully, it’s not like you had to do this very often. Patches and program versions weren’t as frequent as they seem to be these days and there was no solid internet connection to download app updates in those days…

Adobe Illustrator 88 floppy disk — 1988 version of Adobe Illustrator application. (Uncredited, but linked to an image social network that has horrible attribution and is all about pinning. An anachronistic metaphor.)

But once you were in… pure vector goodness, geometry, grids, curves, masks, wordmarks, logotypes, banners, fantastic and previously impossible computer illustrations. It was mind alteringly wonderful.

But, enough. This topic is endless.

Uninstallation

The point of this post is to talk about moving away from Adobe’s products. So much history, so much love, from me, anyhow.

Doing digital work these last three decades has been an interesting trip regarding software. Beziers, pixels, guides, acquisitions, mergers, end-of-lifes, design trends, digital tokens, etc., etc., …no pointing fingers here, …but it’s time to say goodbye. Again. And let’s give it a good try this time.

There are so many apps that help you make vector designs these days. Go explore. You really should. There’s solid gold computer programs waiting for you to test them.