Big News from Adobe. Love them or hate them, they keep ploughing on with new features for their creative suite of applications.

And leaving aside all the possible and real issues surrounding whether Adobe are cannibalising their own customers… Illustrator just got a seriously cool upgrade and it’s kind of blowing our minds a bit. 

Check out the video on Adobe’s You Tube channel (skip to the 30s mark). You can now rotate flat illustrations and watch as Illustrator then generates the image from every angle. That’s right! What used to take hours of fussy redrawing and perspective tweaking can now happen in just a few clicks. This is Illustrators 3D from 2D vectors project.

At Caffeine Creative, we’re buzzing (pun intended) with excitement at the feature itself. This new feature doesn’t just save time but also, potentially, opens up a whole new world of creative possibilities. It lets us spend less time on the technical grunt work and more time thinking up the concepts. 

But we do get it, not everyone is throwing a party over this. For some illustrators, this tech leap might feel more like a threat to their careers than a treat. If something that once took hours now takes seconds… what does that mean for the value of the hard earned craft?  

We are not alone in feeling the nibbling around the edges of the creative services industry of AI. We feel the benefits, but can also see the potential issues inherent with it. 

Ever since the new AI features have been finding their way into Adobe’s creative suite, we have been keeping up to date with them. Some are very good. Some, in conjunction, with our existing skills help reduce the time to make certain elements (which is a benefit for the client as less time = less money for them).

However, some have been amazing at the demo stage (like the video we see linked too in this article) but have then failed to meet expectations on delivery. For example, the text to vector tool in Illustrator is interesting, but produces some very poorly created vector illustrations. These can look great initially but when you start to look closer (or have a go at editing them) they just don’t hang together, they are not good enough.

So, illustrators and anyone affected by this new technology… does this feel like a revolution or a massive red flag? If it is a red flag, what can be done anyway? Is it inevitable—as when publishing went from physical layout (manual cutting out of elements and then shot on film) to desktop publishing?

The video can be found here.

Ben

Caffeine Creative are an experienced team based in the Cardiff area. We help with graphic design, web development, company values, social media, video, branding and more. To know more please contact us, we’d love to chat.