Along with Creative Cloud (Adobe's shift to a monthly or annual subscription service delivered over the Internet), Illustrator CC was released.

Adobe co-founder and CEO John Warnock created Illustrator in late 1986 to automate many of the manual tasks utilized by his wife, Marva, a graphic designer.

[3][4] Illustrator was released in early 1987,[5] and became a commercialization of Adobe's in-house font development software and PostScript file format.

In the early 1990s, Adobe released versions of Illustrator for Display PostScript licensees NeXT, Digital Equipment Corporation Ultrix, Silicon Graphics IRIX, and Sun Solaris platforms, but they were discontinued due to poor market acceptance.

The interface changed radically with the following version to bring consistency between Mac and Windows computer platforms.

With true user interface parity between Macintosh and Windows versions starting with 7.0, designers could finally standardize on Illustrator.

[15] Illustrator Version 9 included a tracing feature, similar to that within Adobe's discontinued product Streamline.

Illustrator CS2 (version 12), released by Adobe in April 2005, was available for both the Mac OS X and Microsoft Windows operating systems.

Live Paint allows users more flexibility in applying color to objects, specifically those that overlap.

In the same year as the CS2 release, Adobe Systems announced an agreement to acquire Macromedia in a stock swap valued at about $3.4 billion and it integrated the companies' operations, networks, and customer-care organizations shortly thereafter.

As a result, Facebook and social media posts appeared from all over the world with vector drawings from Adobe Ideas from pros and novices alike.

Adobe added many more features and several bug fixes such as a new user interface, layer panels, RGB codes, and color ramp to increase performance.

This version (the 17th) was the first to be only sold in a subscription-based service model, in line with the other software in the formerly called Creative Suite.

As part of Creative Cloud, this version brought improvements in that subject such as color, font and program settings syncing, saving documents to the cloud, and integration with Behance (a creative collaborative network), as well as other features such as a new touch-compatible type tool, images in brushes, CSS extraction, and files packaging.

John Warnock desired a Renaissance image to evoke his vision of PostScript as a new Renaissance in publishing, and Adobe employee Luanne Seymour Cohen, who was responsible for the early marketing material, found Venus' flowing tresses a perfect vehicle for demonstrating Illustrator's strength in tracing smooth curves over bitmap source images.

Over the years the rendition of this image on Illustrator's splash screen and packaging became more stylized to reflect features added in each version.

The image of Venus was replaced (albeit still accessible via easter egg) in Illustrator CS (11.0) and CS2 (12.0) by a stylized flower to conform to the Creative Suite's nature imagery.

[19] In CS3, Adobe changed the suite branding once again, to simple colored blocks with two-letter abbreviations, resembling a periodic table of elements.

A sidebar that appears at the left of the screen with a variety of tools to select, create, and manipulate objects or artworks in Illustrator.

These tools can be selected as following: drawing, typing, painting, reshaping, slicing and cutting, symbolism, moving and zooming, and graph.

[26] The same "dual path" approach as for PGF is used when saving EPS-compatible files in recent versions of Illustrator.