Skip to content

Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests

← Adobe Illustrator

When entering a new feature request, please provide:

  1. Description
  2. Why is this valuable to you?

How can we improve Illustrator (desktop)? Vote or share a new idea — one request per entry, please.

(thinking…)

Enter your idea and we'll search to see if someone has already suggested it.

If a similar idea already exists, you can support and comment on it.

If it doesn't exist, you can post your idea so others can support it.

Enter your idea and we'll search to see if someone has already suggested it.

  • Hot ideas
  • Top ideas
  • New ideas
  • My feedback

562 results found

  1. Make Spiral as a live shape, editable after it has been drawn

    It could be useful to have an option for adding segments, or changing decay, especially if it serves as a path for text.

    12 votes
    5 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  2. Archimedean Spirals

    Surely this should just be a default option for spiral drawing, in the current state of design i would imagine regular spirals would be used far more often than logarithmic, the current way to create them is lengthy and cumbersome.
    Hope this makes it!

    12 votes
    7 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  3. Add Transform Again Individually / Transform Sequence Again / Sequence Again Individually commands, as in InDesign

    Illustrator has Transform Again command (and it’s rather useful), but InDesign has three additional commands:

    1. Transform Again Individually:
      Applies the last single transform operation to each selected object individually, rather than as a group.

    2. Transform Sequence Again:
      Applies the last sequence of transform operations to the selection.

    3. Transform Sequence Again Individually:
      Applies the last sequence of transform operations to each selected object individually.

    As described here: https://helpx.adobe.com/indesign/using/transforming-objects.html#repeat_transformations

    Here is a video demonstrating the difference between these: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4gLe9LeRKI

    Sure, we have Transform Each as a workaround, but it doesn’t support custom pivots as tools do, and these are just faster.

    If…

    11 votes
    0 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  4. Hitting Escape while creating a shape, an artboard, while using Rotate, Scale, etc., doesn't cancel the process

    When we marquee a selection and hit Escape — it gets canceled.
    When we hit Escape while dragging out a guide — it gets canceled.
    Dragging out a brush on the canvas — works.
    Dragging out a swatch to drop it on a gradient or the canvas — works.
    Dragging the appearance form the Appearance panel — works.
    ...and many other cases

    Escape does NOT work for these cases:
    1. Creating a shape, an artboard, an area text
    2. Rotating, scaling, shearing, free transforming...
    3. Setting up the width with the Width tool
    4. Setting up the gradient with the…

    11 votes
    0 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  5. Split "Scale strokes and Effects" into two options...

    Please split the "Scale strokes and effects" into two options, one for strokes, and one for effects. See mockup attached.

    11 votes
    4 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  6. Add a Step and Repeat Feature

    11 votes
    3 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  7. Make Pen and Scissors tools prioritize editing to a selected path

    Am I missing something? can the pen and scissors tool prioritize editing to the selected path? If I'm editing a path behind another path it is often a complete guessing game when I'm trying to edit a selected path if it is anywhere near the top path.
    I just don't understand why anybody would find it useful that a selected path would be ignored for another overlapping path when using the pen or scissors tools

    11 votes
    4 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  8. 3 points arc creation tool (as a live shape)

    Arcs and 'pie' shapes created from the center point and specifying the start and end angles that remain 'live' after creation.
    Same as in CorelDraw!... been using Illustrator for 15 years had to revert to Corel for this feature.

    11 votes
    8 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  9. flip horizontal and flip vertical from contextual menu

    Please add "flip vertical" and "flip horizontal" to the "Transform..." contextual menu pop-up in Illustrator. We have this function in Animate already. It would improve workflow and is something that should be relatively easy to program. Thank you for all your hard work improving Illustrator.

    11 votes
    5 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  10. Add CAD path creation/modification tools

    Some wonderful tools that would help are Trim, Extend, and Corner tools.

    Trim allows you to stop a line at another line. So if you drew a + you could trim the top to the - and make a T.

    Extend does the opposite. It makes a line longer until it hits a target line. It turns |- into a T (rotated).

    Corner tool trims or extends two lines as need to make a corner. |- becomes L by clicking both lines.

    Look to AutoCad or Revit for examples.

    11 votes
    1 comment  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  11. Restrict Pan to work only Horizontally / Vertically with a Shift modifier

    I'd love if there was a key we could hold down to restrict the hand tool to only pan perfectly vertical or horizontal. Would make it easier to develop for web — you could quickly get a sense of how a site would work when the user scrolls.

    11 votes
    1 comment  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  12. Chained dimensions

    New Dimension tool is designed to be good-enough, but not be way too complex to setup and use.

    One of things we need to be a part of this 'good-enough' set of features it has should be a way to create consequential serialized dimensions, like the image attached demonstrates.

    To do that now, we’d have to drag each segment one-by-one, and snap the dimensions line to each other (which in the current build just doesn’t happen even!). This method is generates doubled lines instead of only one, and won’t allow us to move all the dimension lines at once if…

    10 votes
    0 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  13. Same functionalities as shown here in the subscribe tool

    https://astutegraphics.com/software/subscribe/
    Basically the 'Circle by Points Tool' in Subscribe should be a functionality added to the Ellipse Tool. And the 'Arch by Points Tool' in Subscribe should be a functionality added to the 'Line Segment Tool' in Ai as well. These are common functions in in cad programs and need to be added to Illustrator natively to improve vector building.

    10 votes
    6 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  14. Chart tool: overriding value axis

    The chart tool breaks when trying to override the axis values when the data numbers are too large. I think it's for any numbers over 1,000,000 but it might be lower (I have not explored it that much.) Checking the override tick box will set the maximum number to 2147483 (maybe that is the number it breaks at) and will skew the chart badly.

    10 votes
    13 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?
    Anish Kumar responded

    Hi Wes,

    Thanks for explanation. I got it. This is a feature request, so I am moving this thread to feature request section.

    Thanks
    Anish

  15. Create folders for brushes

    Can we get the ability to create folders for brushes?

    I would like to be able to group my brushes by length, width, style, color, etc. As it is now, I have to wait for the tooltip to show up before I know whether my brush is a medium, short, long stroke...

    10 votes
    1 comment  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  16. Better join segments tool

    There are instances (mostly when cleaning up DXF files from 3D models) were there are a lot of broken line segments. It would be great if there were options for the join command to join multiple line segments that are within a certain distance and tangent angle to each other. It would then take multiple separate line segments and join them into one clean and continuous line.

    Maybe there would also be a preview ability that would recolor\highlight the lines that would be joined and then allow you to adjust the distance and angle until you get the desired result.

    …

    10 votes
    2 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  17. Select objects to then apply auto selection criteria

    Once objects are selected apply the auto select criteria such as "same fill color" or "same outline". If this is possible, I can't figure out how to do it. I can only choose to select all of the items of a single color, because I have items already selected. Also, it would be great for quotes to be able to get a quick total of the number of items selected. Is this information listed somewhere on screen that I've never noticed?

    10 votes
    2 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  18. Press Alt while creating a radius / diameter dimension to toggle these two mode on the fly

    Currently Dimension tool requires you to orient your cursor when creating a radius or diameter: inside of the clicked shape to create a diameter or outside to make it a radius.

    This is very nifty, sure.
    But:

    1. The tool hardly tells you about it when you draw. The only hint Ai give us is a blue bar (that we all tired of seeing, because everything in Ai now pops and shouts and distracts — I’m speaking about use, Text To Vector!) — I attach the screenshot of it for those who blinked and missed it.

    2. If I work with a…

    9 votes
    0 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  19. Press Shift to constrain the angle of a radius / diameter dimension

    Shift is universally used to constrain a drawn art to 0-45-90° angles when using a tool. This applies to lines, rectangles, other shapes, anything that can be clearly oriented.

    The Dimension tool breaks the paradigm — we can’t hold shift to constraint the angle of the drawn dimension line when creating radii or dimeters.

    Some standards require us to have these lines too use integer steps, like 15° or 30°... this is very hard to comply now.

    Please either make the tool to respect angles set in Preferences > Smart Guides, or make it a separate setting in the tool’s…

    9 votes
    0 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?

  20. More precision options for Dimension Tool

    Please add: 0"-0 1/8" & 0"-0 1/16" to Unit precision. I really need 3/8", 5/8", 7/8"...

    9 votes
    4 comments  ·  Tools  ·  Admin →
    How important is this to you?
1 2 3 5 7 … 28 29
  • Don't see your idea?

Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests

Categories

Feedback and Knowledge Base

(thinking…)