Add Biology & Scientific Diagram Tools for Easy Cell and Medical Illustrations
As an illustrator specializing in biology, microbiology, and scientific educational diagrams, I often find it time-consuming and challenging to create natural-looking cells, organelles, biological textures, and clean labels within Adobe Illustrator. To improve workflow and accuracy, I propose that Adobe adds a dedicated set of toolbar tools designed specifically for biological and scientific illustrations, focusing on ease of use, organic shapes, and diagramming features.
Suggested Tools Include:
Organic Blob Tool: Create irregular, smooth cell shapes with adjustable wobble and roundness.
Cell Chain Tool: Draw linked cells or bacteria chains with customizable spacing and size.
Pseudopod Tool: Add flowing, arm-like extensions for visualizing amoebas or cellular movement.
Membrane Ripple Tool: Generate subtle wavy edges to mimic membranes or cell walls.
Cell Texture Fill Tool: Fill cells with natural biological textures like cytoplasm or granules.
Nucleus Tool: Easily place nuclei or organelles centered inside cells.
Cilia Brush Tool: Paint fine hair-like cilia or flagella projections from edges.
Cross Section Tool: Draw dashed sectional lines with arrows and labels for anatomy diagrams.
Label Connector Tool: Create snapping leader lines with easy label placement for diagrams.
Microscope View Tool: Apply circular magnification overlays with blur outside for micrographs.
Force Vector Tool: Draw arrows representing flows or directional forces scaled by magnitude.
Data Plot Brush: Sketch rough graphs that snap cleanly to axis-aligned charts.
Molecular Cluster Tool: Generate clusters of atoms or molecules with bonded shapes.
Field Line Tool: Illustrate magnetic, electric, or fluid flow lines around objects smoothly.
Radiation Emission Tool: Show particle or wave emissions radiating from points.
Circuit Path Tool: Draw technical flow lines with snap-to-grid elbows for pathways.
Axis Label Tool: Quickly create labeled graph axes with ticks and units.
Tissue Matrix Tool: Fill areas with fibrous or mesh-like biological textures.
Vein & Branch Tool: Create branching structures like veins, roots, or neural networks with adjustable density and angles.
Specimen Label Tool: Add smart snapping labels with leader lines for specimens or cell parts.
Benefits:
Speeds up the creation of scientific and biological illustrations
Reduces reliance on manual anchor editing or complicated plugins
Enables clear, professional, and natural diagrams for education and publication
Supports educators, researchers, and medical illustrators with specialized tools
Please consider adding these toolbar tools to Illustrator to make it the go-to app for biological and scientific illustrations
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Em Jay commented
I think broadening the functionality of these tools so that they're applicable to a wider audience could help with getting your request implemented. The following is based on my understanding of your descriptions. I see that Egor has addressed some of this already, so sorry for any repeats.
Organic Blob: this sounds similar to metaball shapes (for which there's already a Script available at illustratorscripts(dot)com). It could be used to make lava lamps, *****, and probably a lot of other things.
Cilia Brush: maybe broaden this and describe it as a fringe tool. That way it could be used in scientific illustrations as well as fashion or home decor. For now, a similar effect could probably be accomplished by adding a gapped stroke to the shape as in the attached image.
Label Connector: this sounds like you want something similar to connectors in Office products like Word or PowerPoint. Is this not already available via snapping to anchor points?
Cell Texture Fill, Microscope View: could possibly be done using pattern fills and/or graphic styles that you can save and reuse.
You may also be able to create some of these graphics and save them as Symbols for reuse.
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Christian Mulcahy commented
I'm trying to make like bacteria, cells, fungi, viruses and amoeba, this is for so that I can educate people that like biology, medicine and science.
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'Similar stuff’? Perhaps it’s time to show some stuff you intend to create? :)
There won’t be a dedicated tool to create 'a red mug with cappuccino' (well, there is one, but it seems like text-to-vector doesn’t suite you) — tools in Ai operate on a more basic level, with primitives, to cover the larger area, to fit everyone’s need, and not only medical students. A general approach.As an example — 'molecular cluster tool'. According to the image, it’s just a bunch of circles, connected with perpendicular lines. There is no tool that would instantly build something like this, but there is Perpendicular Tool form Astute Graphics (https://docs.astutegraphics.com/subscribe/perpendicular-line-tool) to connect circles and Snap to Collision tool (https://docs.astutegraphics.com/colliderscribe/snap-to-collisions-tool) to arrange the circles with a given distance.
So — share some images already. What do you need to create?
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Christian Mulcahy commented
Also is there any like plugins that exist that allow you do do similar stuff, to the tools I suggested?
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Christian Mulcahy commented
And no, the original request that I said is not AI-generated :)
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Christian Mulcahy commented
Well, can I show what the tools do? Actually not with AI? (sry I'm lazy lol)
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Christian :) These are icons, generated by a multimodal LLM. I bet the same applies to the text of your original request.
Most of the things depicted can be done with existing tools Ai has, effects (appearance, graphic styles).
Wobbly line of the 'Organic blob'? It’s Zig Zag + Round Corners ('membranud', heh)
Cell chains and pseudopods? It’s a popular 'metaball' method, a compound shapes with double Offset Path applied.
Cell textures, tissues? Patterns.
Brush an veins can be done with brushes.
All these require some setup and work.But unless you share some ACTUAL images, examples, you intend to produce, instead of hallucinated ones... I suggest using LLMs further :)
I’d really want to help, but I can’t help a robot. -
Christian Mulcahy commented
Here is the example for the suggested tools for biological and scientific illustrations!
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Christian Mulcahy commented
Hi Adobe Team,
I'm a student and illustrator who often creates biology and microbiology diagrams in Illustrator — things like cells, tissues, organelles, and educational layouts. Illustrator is great for clean vector work, but drawing natural biological forms requires a lot of time using existing shape and path tools.
I'm suggesting a small set of toolbar tools specifically for biology/medical/scientific illustration. These tools would help users quickly sketch diagrams like cells, cilia, tissues, or microscope views, without needing custom brushes or manual anchor editing.
Some of the tools I’m suggesting include:
Organic Blob Tool – makes soft, natural cell shapes
Cilia Brush Tool – paints hairlike projections along a path
Label Connector Tool – quick snapping lines for pointing to labeled parts
Cell Texture Fill Tool – fills a shape with cytoplasm-like granules
Microscope View Tool – adds a magnified circular view with blur outside
⚠️ I understand these are niche, and not everyone on the team is a biologist. To help, I'm currently working on a single visual mockup page showing what each tool would do. I’ll update this post with a link to that soon.
Thank you for considering support for additional scientific and educational illustration features in Illustrator. If any of this already exists as a plugin, I’d love recommendations too. I can show you some like examples if you want more clarification.
— Christian
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Christian, this is an extremely narrow and quite dense package of requests...
Some plugin tools out there exist to help you with some of these, but I’m not a biologist and I can’t be sure these could help you based on text definitions only. I bet none from the team is a biologist as well. Please provide images to support your request.