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Design Adobe Illustrator for Web Design Starting Your Adobe Illustrator Project Introducing the Project

Sardor Latipov
Sardor Latipov
5,609 Points
Posted by Sardor Latipov
Sardor Latipov
5,609 Points

Free Adobe Illustrator for beginners? I want to learn it, but I can't afford it.

I see Adobe Illustrator has monthly fee. is there free version for students, beginners? or Can I buy it with one time payment? I don't get it why does it cost monthly. isn't it something I can buy on amazon and install it like other softwares? Sorry for the dumb question. Thank you!

Kris Blanchette
Kris Blanchette
174 Points
Kris Blanchette
Kris Blanchette
174 Points

After a certain adobe version, I believe 6, they stopped selling the standalone application and starting selling it only as a subscription. If I recall correctly, the subscription isn't that much and it would be worth it to have the newest version. However you could probably find an older version to purchase somewhere. Perhaps even craigslist.

Alternately https://inkscape.org/en/ is a great opensource/free illustrator.

4 Answers

Ivan Braun
Ivan Braun
32 Points
Ivan Braun
Ivan Braun
32 Points

You can save a lot (I mean, a lot) on Adobe CC. I won't tell you the how, just two facts:

  1. They offer 50% discounts for students and teachers, and they don't check much
  2. They have much lower pricing for different countries, such as Argentina.

As to the alternatives: As said, Sketch is great for UX. I use it. Some 2017 alternatives are Figma and in lesser degree Framer (if you are tech-savvy enough to learn CoffeeScript).

However, if you do illustration or other complicated vector graphics, Illustrator is way more powerful. We have 5 icon designers in our team, and all of them prefer Illustrator.

Inkscape seems to be powerful, and we use it on the server (it has a command line interface), but again, I don't know anyone personally who prefers it for graphics.

Jacob Mishkin
Jacob Mishkin
23,117 Points
Jacob Mishkin
Jacob Mishkin
23,117 Points

You'll see this more and more, and it sucks, you can't buy adobe anymore, mostly due to the pirated copies every one had years ago. So now you can "lease" adobe suite, I think it's around $20-$50 a month. If you want a solid alternative that costs $100 and I think there is a 20% discount for Treehouse students, try Sketch. Its solid, and made for web design. Its not as powerful as adobe, but for most web design it works well. Here is a link to their site.

Sketch

I'm assuming you are using a mac, if not I would look into window based design tools.

stjarnan
seal-mask
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
stjarnan
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 56,488 Points
stjarnan
.a{fill-rule:evenodd;}techdegree seal-36
stjarnan
Front End Web Development Techdegree Graduate 56,488 Points

Hey Sardor!

Like Jacob suggested, Sketch is a great option! Another great option is Affinity Designer, which also has a photo counterpart that works like photoshop! That's what I use, and they work great. Affinity Designer is in beta on windows 10, but will soon be released according to the creator, and Affinity Photo will soon come after it. So if you're on Windows 10 Affinity would still be a great option.

Please let us know if you have more questions!

Steve Marson
Steve Marson
31 Points
Steve Marson
Steve Marson
31 Points

I find Adobe products slow to use, difficult to learn (especially as the suite of programs differ enough to be annoying). So I use Affinity Designer and Affinity Photo. It's a great suite of design tools and only costs £50 or so. And that's not per month, that's for the program. See https://affinity.serif.com/en-gb/

Affinity is so easy to use, has great tools for web design and graphic design and is really quick. The only thing I can't do is product mockups as Adobe has a special tool for wrapping artwork around objects but apart from that, it's brilliant.

I use Affinity for all of my website design projects and graphic design work. Take a look .. https://www.thecubelab.co.uk

Try Affinity, you won't look back!