Early Illustrator Creations

ILLUSTRATION design graphic design print design Drawing

We asked our Illustrator community to share their earliest Illustrator projects on Facebook and Twitter. Share yours with #Ai30th!

"Used Adobe Illustrator for creating thousands of pieces of type, layout art, informational graphics and maps at three newspapers over the years. It has useful chart/graph tools that facilitate working collaboratively within tight deadlines. This is an ancient example." - Linda Hawks Oistad

"I was working at Boeing Commercial Airplane Company in 1987. One of my first projects, was to create an illustration of a Boeing 747 airliner, for a maintenance manual." - Steven Parente

"First Illustrator project was a self portrait created entirely out of a font when I was in college!☺️ I think in 2007?" - Sahar Naderi

"Also in 1990 drew hundreds of spot illustrations in Illustrator. Here are a few." - Linda Hawks Oistad

"At my L.A. design studio we started with Macs (SE and Mac II) and Illustrator 88 in 1987. Some of our early work was like this. Unfortunately, most of the work from that period is no longer available in high resolution." - Alan Stone

"Illustrator makes work more efficient and precise. Before Illustrator, we used technical pens, French curves and templates, rubber cement, and cut overlays to create quick graphics. Thank you for those 30 years!" - Linda Hawks Oistad

"Drawn in Illustrator 1 May 1987. I scanned a piece of airbrush art from a magazine using a little scanner attachment on my ImageWriter dot matrix printer. Then drew each piece individually. Combined them all into this piece. My notes say it too me 10 hours. I purchased my Mac SE30 new and had to have the computer store (Byte Shop in Columbia, SC) order Illustrator for me. It was so new, nobody had it." - Eddie Albert

"1992 - Yellow Pages ad. Notice the difference in color from the in-house printer (left) to the 4p press version. Good to know that some things never change <snicker>" - Michelle Wallace Murakami

"I do a lot of illustrated site plans for home builders and developers. I remember literally jumping around in my office 20 years ago the first time I got an engineer's drawing into my Mac, saved it as a .tif, pulled it into AI and started re-drawing it with the pen tool and Bézier curves and all... It was an unforgettable "eureka" night." - John Stolly

"The first time I had access to Adobe Illustrator was in 1990 at the Dallas Morning News. This is one of the first two or three info graphics I created in Illustrator" - Linda Hawks Oistad

"I think this was the first project I created with Illustrator, in 1998 maybe?" - Ian Carey (@IanCareyJazz)

"This was a self-assigned exercise to get myself familiar with the program. Fall 1994" - Edwina Owens Elliott

"My first ever proper piece in Illustrator, still really like it to this day." - Richard Radford (@radders_79)

"Learned Illustrator CS6 in 2013. First vector graphic." - Steven Hight

"One of the first complete projects I created with illustrator for my college Digital Media II class #ai30th #sru @Illustrator" - Matthew Gahr (@gahr_matthew)

"A typeface I designed based on Tetris pieces" - Chris 'Tinman' Bradbury

"Took classes about Illustrator in 2014. First half-cut portrait and it still is one of my favorite drawings!" - Gabrielle Ménard

"ma first vector work on #ai30th CS3... happy birthday @Illustrator !!! thanks for being there with me on ma works :)" - @IknowSwordFest

"2007 I think? I was using CS2 and I drew my snowboard photo learning to use brushes and retro-like colouring from a John Kelly tutorial. Have a lot to be thankful for that moment. Gave myself wings too cause vector wings, why not." - Rameez Quadri