From Words to Wonders
Exploring the Magic of Adobe Illustrator’s Text-to-Vector for Unique Illustrations
What do all of these things have in common?
1) Unicorn doing a keg stand 2) Snowman drinking whisky by a fire 3) Octopus playing golf 4) Pirate eating pancakes 5) Girl doing ballet on top of a cake 6) Shark eating spaghetti on a toilet
They are all prompts I put into Adobe Illustrators new Beta ‘Text to Vector’ tool. It automates the illustration process with AI generated results. Within seconds you can create multitudes of designs that fulfill your wildest imagination. You can adjust the style to match a specific artist or illustration type. You can ask it to make an entire scene or just a specific object to add to an existing illustration. They go even further allowing you to build icons and patterns.
For the first iteration of this tool, honestly, it’s not that bad, considering how wildly bizarre my prompts were. There’s some obvious issues out the gate, like that’s definietly not a keg the unicorn is leaning on, the octopus’ golf ball is tied to an invisible string, the sharks anatomy is questionable. The quality of the vectors is surprisingly good beyond some sketchy lines most evident in the pirate illustration.
Why am I so excited for this tool?
I’ve seen pixel based AI generated art but this is vector art, completely native within the Adobe Illustrator program. Scalability and editability are paramount to the custom illustration process. This will allow the user to build and stack elements at will. Something that we haven’t seen from AI generated imagery that has blown up within the last year.
All too often designers get requests from clients or even friends asking for something absurd. These designs were half-baked from an exercise I used to do with my coworkers at Dino Marketing Group. Who could come up with the most absurd illustration request, that we could easily expect to hear from our clients. What’s the client’s budget? Stock.
Will this tool replace truly creative individuals, illustrators? I certainly hope not. What I do think is a certain eventuality, the most successful designers will be the ones that know when to use these tools and when to hire those that can do it better. We will need to filter out the noise, curate, and use portions of each in our creative process. I don’t think generative art is something we need to fear. Artists have had to change direction in every era of art. Styles of painting, sculpture, and architecture always change as technology and techniques change. Lest us forget the progression from the printing press, portable painting tubes, abstraction, surrealism, cubism, photography, moving pictures, computers, CGI.
I’m incredibly excited to see the product and it’s capabilities grow. Do I fear it, the uncertainty for the market does creep in a bit, but boy we’re sure in the middle of a movement in design. This is something, especially in a world where us as creatives are offered limited resources.
