Thanks to Laura Worthington of Laura Worthington Type for sharing memories of Illustrator. Check out the rest of the series here.

What is your earliest memory of using Adobe Illustrator?
1995! I was in college, studying to be a graphic designer. Illustrator became very important in my first job as a graphic designer, where I worked as a production designer for a large format screen printer, making vehicle wraps, floor, ceiling and wall graphics. We used to create templates of buses from nothing but a page of dimensions provided by clients and Illustrator’s tools were absolutely essential to do that.

How did Illustrator impact your career path as a type designer?
When I first got started as a type designer, I would use Illustrator to work with my lettering before putting it into FontLab. (I was still getting used to the program and wasn’t comfortable with it yet.) I now use Illustrator for testing my fonts and creating graphics.

How did your relationship to Illustrator change over the years? How do you use Illustrator in your work today?
I used it for graphic design, in fact, as a designer, it was my primary program as most of the designs I created were single page layouts or illustration, lettering, etc. Now I use it, again, for testing and creating type related graphics.

What do you think Illustrator’s biggest type-related legacy has been?
The ability to manipulate type, to customize it, to create amazing graphics with it that you can’t do in most other programs by keeping it vector format, being able to stylize it as needed, add effects, etc. To also be able to use the glyphs and OpenType panel to find what you need and fully explore the features of a typeface. Illustrator is quite robust in its type related possibilities, moreso than any other program.

Anything else to add?
I couldn’t live without it 🙂