Illustrator Newsletter - January 2022

Report · Jan 10, 2022

The Adobe Community Team wishes a very Happy New Year to all of you.

In this edition of the newsletter, you will find links to tutorials, quick tips, and a feature on one of our favorite ACPs (Adobe Community Professional), Ton Frederiks. For previous versions of the newsletter, see Adobe Illustrator Newsletter Home page.

ACP Highlight

Ton Frederiks joined the Adobe family on ‎‎Jun 30, 2009. We are amazed at the breadth of his expertise and how he always has the answers that people are looking for. The community continues to learn and benefit from his presence.

Let's know more about Ton in his own words:-

I studied graphic design and illustration at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam, a school for fine arts and design. I was always interested in technology, but at that time, in the late sixties/early seventies, there were no computers available at the academy. During 15 years, I made illustrations, paintings and did lay-out work for magazines and books, all manual processes. That changed around 1985 when I saw the first Macintosh, the Apple Laserwriter, and the Linotronic 100 imagesetter with Adobe PostScript. My brother Hans and I started a company supported by the distributor of that hardware and Adobe software in the Netherlands, MacVONK. Now you cannot imagine how expensive the hardwaree and software was at that time, a black&white laser printer like the Apple LaserWriter Plus cost almost 6000 dollars, and a greyscale scanner, like the Agfa focus II scanner at that time, cost more than $6000. To explain what you could do with a scanner, I wrote a book, did the layout in an application named RagTime, made the examples with Image Studio and Illustrator 88, and produced the film (I left the printing to MacVONK). We had good contact with Adobe and got beta versions of the software that Adobe developed, Illustrator, Streamline, and of course, Photoshop. Because I had experience with image editing applications like ImageStudio and ColorStudio (which were more advanced at that time than the early version of Photoshop), I was asked by Adobe Europe to support and evangelise Photoshop in Europe. Adobe had already changed my life, so I did not hesitate and joined the company in 1990. At that time, Adobe had less than 400 employees worldwide and was what we would call now still a startup company. I worked at Adobe Europe until the office moved from Amsterdam to Edinburgh after the merge with Aldus, became a freelancer, and joined Adobe again in the Netherlands when InDesign was introduced.

I always had a soft spot for Illustrator, and when Illustrator became 25, we (my brother Hans and I) made an iPad app with InDesign to celebrate that. Only last year I found this review:

https://creativepro.com/around-the-world-epublishing-with-pariah-burke-adobe-illustrator-the-early-y...

Unfortunately, Adobe DPS was discontinued, and so was the app.

I really enjoyed my time at Adobe, met many nice and interesting people, gave demos in Europe, the US, and Asia, and another highlight received the founders award. When it was my time to retire in 2014, I thought it would be a good idea to be involved with Illustrator and the community; I like to help people with questions and get a lot of knowledge back from the forums. And what else do you do when you are retired; enjoy life, your wife, your children and grandchildren, your garden, and play with Illustrator, rotating multiple triangles in the appearance panel and screen recording the result.

I started recently started a new series on Behance; Playing with Adobe Illustrator. Check out the first one here.

Some of my old Artworks

Behance Live Stream Update

Paul Trani is our Principal Worldwide Design Evangelist for Creative Cloud apps. With an experience spanning more than 30 years, he has become a wizard when it comes to Illustrator.

Check out his recent Design Master Class Session and subscribe to Adobe live for upcoming sessions.

Adobe Illustrator update 26.0.2

The Adobe Illustrator version 26.0.2 brings to you the following stability and performance-related fixes.

Click here for more information.

Trending Issues

1. Issue:- [Monterey] Save/export dialogs don't appear with Side-Car/external display connected.
Solution:- Update macOS to latest version 12.1.