Replace your AI Splash screen with Venus

[Toulousifer]

For those of you old enough to remember when the splash screen art of Illustrator showcased its latest innovative features, and not some random/subjectively cringy artwork, here's a solution that you might like:

The attached files will give you three different-sized splash screen pngs with the artwork above, which I believe was for Illustrator 9 or 10.

To install on a Mac:

1. Quit Illustrator.

2. Select the Adobe Illustrator 2021 application icon, right click and choose Show Package Contents.

3. Open the Contents folder.

4. Open the Resources folder.

5. Option-drag the three PNG files into the Adobe Illustrator 2021-->Contents-->Resources folder.

Maybe, just maybe, the 2022 update that will be out in a few months will have artwork that does the product justice. And maybe it will have some compelling new functionality...j/k. Instead, you should save these images so you can replace whatever cringe-worthy art they will put in there (the splash screen will reset for each minor update, so you'll need to drag these files after each of those too).

[Monika Gause]

Editing the application package contents is at your own risk.

If you do it wrong, it might need a reinstall of the application.

While Illustrator 9 and 10 used this kind of rendition of the Birth of Venus, the image you posted is not the original artwork. The original splashscreens can be seen here: https://guidebookgallery.org/splashes/illustrator

So you are posting artwork by someone else. Is it yours? Do you have the copyright?

[Toulousifer]

This was probably the Venus artwork that was going to be used in Illustrator 11, before the Creative Suite renaming/rebranding.

And yes, I have the original Illustrator file used to make this.

[Monika Gause]

And yes, I have the original Illustrator file used to make this.

By @Toulousifer

That wasn't my question. The question  was if you have sufficient copyrights to make a splash screen out of it and share it.

What makes you think that artwork was going to be used in the spalsh screen of Illustrator CS (version 11)? Wishful thinking?

[Toulousifer]

Yes, if you modify files willy-nilly from the Package Contents of any application, things could go bad (not sure what it takes to cause problems with Adobe software, but modifying the splash screen using the steps above won't be one of them).

In fact, if you don't want to see any splash screen, you can simply delete the ai_cc_splash files from the Resources folder. It doesn't save on loading time (about 5 seconds on my 2019 27" iMac), but it *feels* slightly faster. You'll go right into Illustrator without displaying anything at all, which is slightly disconcerting since we've all been trained to expect splash screens for big applications... 😄