: Adobe Illustrator was actually born out of a husband's desire to help his wife. Adobe co-founder John Warnock

was infamous—but not for good reasons. Adobe, for the only time in the software’s history, released a Windows version first (Mac users had to wait a year). The Mac version was buggy and slow, driving many designers into the arms of FreeHand 3.0.

By the 2010s, the basics were solved. Now it was about refinement and speed.

But how did we get from wooden printing blocks to the powerful software we use today? Let’s dive into the two-part history of the "Illustrator."

added Transparency and Drop Shadows . This sounds simple, but it was a nightmare for printers. Suddenly, designers were putting overlapping transparent shapes on a page. How do you print that? Adobe answered with PDF , making Illustrator the best PDF editor on the market.