Adobe Illustrator Versions By Year Page

The Dynamic Symbol. Focus on productivity for large projects.

Adobe consolidated its products into the "CS" (Creative Suite) bundle, ending the standalone version numbering. adobe illustrator versions by year

2005: Illustrator CS2 (Version 12)

2007: Illustrator CS3 (Version 13)

2008: Illustrator CS4 (Version 14)

2010: Illustrator CS5 (Version 15)

2012: Illustrator CS6 (Version 16)

A workhorse. Version 8.0 introduced the Pencil Tool for freehand vector drawing (with path smoothing) and the Eyedropper Tool for sampling appearance attributes. It also added dynamic gradients (you could click and drag the gradient slider in the document window). Crucially, it improved PDF import/export, making Illustrator a go-to tool for prepress workflows. The Dynamic Symbol

The Meme: The "Puppet Warp" tool is still missing, but the Eraser tool finally works like a real eraser.

Focus: Type Enhancements. This version gave us Visual Font Browsing (see font previews in the character panel), Align to Glyph (precise alignment of objects to the edge of a letter), and the Font Selfie feature (create custom fonts from sketches). It also added Quick Actions (one-click vectorization or color adjustment). 2005: Illustrator CS2 (Version 12)

The Flop: The "Artboard tool" was clunky; many called it a beta feature.