A delightful, illuminating history of Illustrator

No wonder Steve Jobs clicked with Adobe founder John Warnock. While introducing the iPad Jobs said,

“The reason that Apple is able to create products like iPad is because we always try to be at the intersection of technology and liberal arts, to be able to get the best of both.”

The Warnock family embodied just that, pairing a pioneering software engineer/mathematician with a professional designer. Their collaboration shaped PostScript and then Adobe’s first app, Illustrator. This beautifully produced little documentary (warning—you’ll get sucked in) tells the tale. I love hearing from old friends & new talent:

Interviews include cofounder John Warnock, his wife Marva, artists and designers Ron Chan, Bert Monroy, Dylan Roscover and Jessica Hische.

Side bonus: Here’s a copy of the VHS demo tape that shipped inside the Illustrator 1.0 box that I uploaded a few years ago:

[Vimeo] [YouTube]

2 thoughts on “A delightful, illuminating history of Illustrator

  1. Thank you for sharing that. It was good to see some of those familiar faces, and see some truly amazing work.

    Martin Evening took me to Photoshop World one year, and I watched Bert Monroy – what an amazing talent. To set the scene he had what I thought was a very plain scene in a marketplace on screen, for some few minutes before his arrival.

    He then started to talk about how he created pictures, all the while creating a few circles, filling them, duplicating them, grouping and overlaying them, offsetting them, then adding drop shadows; he had us all hooked – what had seemed a mundane photo was in fact an extraordinary piece of creation from a blank canvas – all delivered with quiet assurance, we were all spellbound. He went on to explain how many of his well-known pictures had been created.

    Later in London, I met Russell-Brown, and what a talent! Both men so totally unalike; they might have come from different planets, and to hear Morva and John Warnock talking about the Genesis of Illustrator in this piece, I smiled all the way through and will watch it through again. Thanks John.

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