Illustrator (Desktop) Feature Requests
When entering a new feature request, please provide:
- Description
- Why is this valuable to you?
440 results found
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Zoom to selection / Fit Selection on Screen, with an assignable hotkey
Just a simple keyboard command that fills the screen with whatever you have selected.
22 votes -
Gradient “easing” / bezier curve control for color stops
Any work that utilizes gradients in Illustrator would benefit greatly from the addition of the ability to manually control/adjust the bezier curves of the gradients’ color stops.
The specifics of how this works are discussed here: https://larsenwork.com/easing-gradients/
Ultimately, this level of control allows for significantly more pleasing and subtle gradients. Relying on midpoints to adjust gradients ultimately results in very obviously visual “steps” from one color stop to the next.
I’ve attached a video demonstrating the easing function, as well as a before and after image to illustrate its effect.
20 votes -
Cmd + H should hide Illustrator on Mac
Yes, CMD-H should be standardized across all of your programs. And kindly take Freehand out of its vault, study its pen/curve tool(s), and make Illustrator's pen tool work as well as Freehand's did.
20 votes -
Keep transparency when raster image is copied/pasted (at least from PS)
I have, let's say, image with background erased. I want to copy it in PS and paste in AI, intending opacity to be kept, but NO, you get opaque image.
I don't care who is in charge for this, you or PS team, just get it done already.19 votes -
Better antialiasing
Long time ago I abandoned Xara and moved to Illustrator full-time.
I managed to solve all problems I had encountered with, but several things still bug me.One of them is this:
https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447-illustrator-bugs/suggestions/31525333-minus-front-on-grouped-objects
https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/601447-illustrator-bugs/suggestions/32954797-pathfinder-must-work-with-group-as-a-single-objectThe other one is a crude antialiasing.
See attached images.
Zara puts more shades of gray to show the slope of test line, while AI leaves more uniformly filled areas. It gets more noticeable when angle gets sharper.
Changing antialising options doesn't help.Please, make antialiasing better.
18 votes -
Lock Attributes Independently
I would like to be able to lock some attributes of an object but not others. For example, lock an object in place, but keep ability to change its colors. Or lock proportions and colors, but keep ability to move and scale, etc.
17 votes -
Group Overlapping Objects
A very casual and time-consuming operation, especially because we lost Object Lasso (https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-desktop-feature-requests/suggestions/44462988-bring-back-object-lasso-tool) — drag a marquee around objects, hit Gtrl+G, drag another, group again... repeat dozens of time, especially if you draw icons or something similar for stocks.
What if Illustrator was able to do it for us?
Scan the selection, search for overlapping objects and create groups?What if it could do that in two modes: simple, by intersecting boundaries, and advanced, when true outlines being checked?
What if it could do that with a tolerance also? Like if object are, say, 10 pixels apart, group…
16 votes -
Change line color and fill color of groups in one click
Let say you have multiple groups existing of line segments and filled objects (lines and circles for example). If I want to change the color of the lines and objects of a group, by clicking on a group, that is not possible. Or all line segments get a fill too or all the objects get a line too.
To fix this, I have to go inside the group, select all the objects, change the fill and then select all the line segments and change the line color.
A button to change the color of all line segments and the color…
16 votes -
Global Edit in Isolation mode
Global edit is very powerful but not a fully realized feature.
Many things are missing from it (like this one: https://illustrator.uservoice.com/forums/333657-illustrator-feature-requests/suggestions/35768314-create-symbols-from-global-edit)Another one is that the Global Edit button is completely missing when you are in isolation mode. So instead of entering a group and editing similar objects only in this particular group, we are forced to lock similar objects manually (because GE won’t allow to do it), EXIT the isolation mode, start GE and edit found similar-s with everything else NOT isolated (which obstructs editing).
Let me provide a practical example I am working on. I have several…
16 votes -
Create symbols from Global Edit
Global Edit is great, but it should have a way to make the globally selected items into multiple instances of a symbol. Once you start Global Edit, as long as the individual items qualify as being instances of the same symbol, that option should be made available to you.
16 votes -
Remember Pathfinder Options across sessions
Currently, the Pathfinder Options are not remembered across Illustrator sessions. This can be tested with the following steps.
- Launch Illustrator.
- Via the Pathfinder panel, use the flyout menu to open Pathfinder Options.
- Set the precision to anything other than 0.028 pt.
- Quit and relaunch Illustrator.
- Reopen the Pathfinder Options. The precision has been set back to 0.028 pt.
It would also be good if the Pathfinder Options were able to be recorded as an action. It seems like a bug that they can not now — recording an action for it appears to work, and there is a Pathfinder Options…
16 votes -
Tie a child shape to parent shape to keep it aligned to parent when resized
Hi everyone,
I posted this as a question in the Illustrator forum (here's the original thread https://community.adobe.com/t5/illustrator/set-shapes-as-child-and-parent-objects-for-dynamic-box-designs/m-p/11688904?page=1#M256580) and was suggested to submit this as a feature request here.
I design boxes in Illustrator for precise cutting in my Silhouette machine. The main problem I encounter with is when I make a box which its shapes are all perfectly aligned, but I then find that I need to tweak its interior size. When I'm doing so I have to re-align all the different pieces of the box shapes such as the spines, wings, etc, since there's no option to tie…
15 votes -
Infinite Canvas
I find myself using more and more Figma to brainstorm and create my designs as I have a single document containing all of my visual explorations.
For print assets I go back to Illustrator and create the final file, but I reallly wish I could have done it all in illustrator. So just removing the canvas limit.
Not artboards or number of something -> just being able to spread and spread your ideas in the same place.15 votes -
Keyboard shortcuts for all Pathfinder options (Unite, Divide, Trim, etc)
I work quickly and would like custom shortcuts for all the Pathfinder options.
15 votes -
Make ImageTrace Like CS5 LiveTrace
ImageTrace may use less points but it completely gets rid of any ink bleed when tracing inked line art. The ink bleed was achievable with CS5 Live Trace but once ImageTrace was introduced it's not possible to achieve with any setting.
Please make ImageTrace great again, it was great as CS5 LiveTrace. Unbeatable. At least make CS5 available through Adobe CC subscription if nothing else.
I know I'm not the only one, please upvote if you feel the same way and miss the accuracy of CS5 LiveTrace.
15 votes -
Introduce bevel joint clamp values for strokes
Adobe's miter limit is something quite weird. I was lucky to find and bookmark this article to learn it, finally:
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/mswanson/2006/03/24/miter-limits-in-illustrator-and-wpf/As you can see, AI have no tools for defining how much of a stroke would be cut when joint is beveled. I want some.
15 votes -
Cluster / group small increment edits like nudging as one "move" in History to undo
In Photoshop, when a user nudges an object by holding down an arrow key for an interval of time, PS clusters that series of nudges as one "move". Then the user can undo all of the nudges at once with one "Undo move" command in the History panel. Since Illy doesn't have a History panel (and why is there no History panel? Don't like it, don't use it.), it's impossible to undo all of the nudges with one "Undo". Please make Illy treat nudges like PS does.
14 votes -
Escape key should deselect any selected object
This would be extremely useful when you are zoomed in and a lot of objects are filled in your screen and there's no empty space around to click if you ever wanna deselect an object. Please map the escape key so that it deselects any selected object.
14 votes -
Match Width or Height to Key Object
I would like a quicker way to match an object's width or height to that of another object. Currently I have to select the correctly sized object, copy the W value, select the next object, and paste the W value. This must be done individually for each object. A pain when you have, say, a dozen objects scattered around the artwork but you want them to all be the same size. I think it could work similarly to the "align to key object" tool.
14 votes -
Let's add Vasily Hall's name to the Ai credits?
These never get added for some reason, so I'm going to try once per day to put it up here:
As you may be aware, Illustrator has a natively build CSV-import feature for variables now. This wouldn't have come if Vasily didn't undertake the effort to create this feature as a script, 3 years prior. https://github.com/Silly-V/Adobe-Illustrator/blob/master/Variable Importer/VariableImporter.jsx
His contribution was:
1. User research, connecting with users from all over the world to get a sense of whether anyone even wants to import CSV files and use graph variables.
2. Naming convention syntax for visibility and graph variables.
3. Logical mechanism…14 votes
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