Top Vector Graphics Software

Hi,

Vector graphics are an important part of today's design techniques. Almost all of us, i mean Graphics Designers have used some kind of vector graphics software for our freelance and other projects. Some of us use multiple software for our projects because of limitations of our software. Yes, every software has its own pros and cons. We cannot rely on only one software to complete our projects. We have to be creative and should have the ability to solve Design Problems and utilize any tools on our disposal to complete Design Projects for our clients.

In this article we have discussed some of the industry standard Vector Graphics Softwares available in market. Some of these are discontinued and some of them are still avaiable. There is no specific criteria for selection of Software in this list. 

If you have any new additions in mind, please let us know via comment section below or via email at Email Alpha Effects




Let's Start Digging deep into vector graphics software.

1. Adobe Illustrator

Adobe Illustrator

Number one on our list is Adobe Illustrator.

Adobe Illustrator is a vector graphics editor developed and marketed by Adobe Systems. The latest version, Illustrator CC 2018, is the 22nd generation in the product line.

Earlier Development

Development of Adobe Illustrator for the Apple Macintosh began in 1985 (shipping in January 1987) as a commercialization of Adobe's in-house font development software and PostScript file format. Adobe Illustrator is the companion product of Adobe Photoshop. Photoshop is primarily geared toward digital photo manipulation and photorealistic styles of computer illustration, while Illustrator provides results in the typesetting and logo graphic areas of design. Early magazine advertisements (featured in graphic design trade magazines such as Communication Arts) referred to the product as "the Adobe Illustrator". Illustrator 88, the product name for version 1.7, was released in 1988 and introduced many new tools and features.

Byte in 1989 listed Illustrator 88 as among the "Distinction" winners of the Byte Awards, stating that with it Adobe had "pulled ahead" of Aldus FreeHand.

Early versions of the software did not support working in preview mode and users needed to have two windows open on their desktop in order to have a live preview of their work. One window to show the work in progress, the other window to show a preview of the work in progress.

Latest Release

Along with Creative Cloud (the result of Adobe's shift on its release strategy), Illustrator CC was released. This version (the 17th) was the first to be only sold in a subscription-based service model, in line with the other software in the formerly called Creative Suite. As part of Creative Cloud, this version brought improvements in that subject such as color, font and program settings syncing, saving documents to the cloud, and integration with Behance (a creative collaborative network), as well as other features such as a new touch-compatible type tool, images in brushes, CSS extraction, and files packaging.

2. Inkscape

Inkscape

Inkscape is a free and open-source vector graphics editor; it can be used to create or edit vector graphics such as illustrations, diagrams, line arts, charts, logos and complex paintings. Inkscape's primary vector graphics format is Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG), however many other formats can be imported and exported.

Inkscape can render primitive vector shapes (e.g. rectangles, ellipses, polygons, arcs, spirals, stars and 3D boxes) and text. These objects may be filled with solid colors, patterns, radial or linear color gradients and their borders may be stroked, both with adjustable transparency. Embedding and optional tracing of raster graphics is also supported, enabling the editor to create vector graphics from photos and other raster sources. Created shapes can be further manipulated with transformations, such as moving, rotating, scaling and skewing.

Earlier Development

Inkscape began in 2003 as a code fork of the Sodipodi project. Sodipodi, developed since 1999, was itself based on Raph Levien's Gill (GNOME Illustration Application).

The Inkscape FAQ interprets the word Inkscape as a compound of ink and scape.

Four former Sodipodi developers (Ted Gould, Bryce Harrington, Nathan Hurst, and MenTaLguY) led the fork; they identified differences over project objectives, openness to third-party contributions, and technical disagreements as their reasons for forking. With Inkscape, they said they would focus development on implementing the complete SVG standard, whereas Sodipodi development emphasized developing a general-purpose vector graphics editor, possibly at the expense of SVG.

Following the fork, Inkscape's developers changed it greatly: they changed the programming language from C to C++; adopted the GTK+ (formerly GIMP Toolkit) toolkit C++ bindings (gtkmm); redesigned its user interface, and added a number of new features. Notably, Inkscape's implementation of the SVG standard, although incomplete, has shown gradual improvement.

Since 2005 Inkscape has participated in the Google Summer of Code program.

Up until the end of November 2007, Inkscape's bug tracking system was hosted on SourceForge. Thereafter it moved to Launchpad. In June 2017 it moved to GitLab.

3. Adobe Photoshop

Adobe Photoshop

Earlier Development

Photoshop was developed in 1987 by the American brothers Thomas and John Knoll, who sold the distribution license to Adobe Systems Incorporated in 1988. Thomas Knoll, a PhD student at the University of Michigan, began writing a program on his Macintosh Plus to display grayscale images on a monochrome display. This program, called Display, caught the attention of his brother John Knoll, an Industrial Light & Magic employee, who recommended that Thomas turn it into a full-fledged image editing program. Thomas took a six-month break from his studies in 1988 to collaborate with his brother on the program. Thomas renamed the program ImagePro, but the name was already taken. Later that year, Thomas renamed his program Photoshop and worked out a short-term deal with scanner manufacturer Barneyscan to distribute copies of the program with a slide scanner; a "total of about 200 copies of Photoshop were shipped" this way.

During this time, John traveled to Silicon Valley and gave a demonstration of the program to engineers at Apple and Russell Brown, art director at Adobe. Both showings were successful, and Adobe decided to purchase the license to distribute in September 1988. While John worked on plug-ins in California, Thomas remained in Ann Arbor writing code. Photoshop 1.0 was released on 19 February 1990 for Macintosh exclusively. The Barneyscan version included advanced color editing features that were stripped from the first Adobe shipped version. The handling of color slowly improved with each release from Adobe and Photoshop quickly became the industry standard in digital color editing. At the time Photoshop 1.0 was released, digital retouching on dedicated high end systems, such as the Scitex, cost around $300 an hour for basic photo retouching.

Latest Release

Photoshop CC 2018 was released on 18 October 2017. It featured an overhaul to the brush organization system, allowing for more properties (such as color and opacity) to be saved per-brush and for brushes to be categorized in folders and sub-folders. It also added brush stroke smoothing, and over 1000 brushes created by Kyle T. Webster (following Adobe's acquisition of his website, KyleBrush.com). A Curvature Pen tool, similar to the one in Illustrator, was added, allowing for faster creation of Bézier paths. Other additions were Lightroom Photo access, Variable font support, copy-paste layers, enhanced tooltips, 360 panorama and HEIF support, PNG compression, algorithm improvements to Face-aware and selection tools, improved image resizing, and performance improvements to file opening, filters, and brush strokes.

4. CorelDRAW

In 1987, Corel engineers Michel Bouillon and Pat Beirne to develop a vector-based illustration program to bundle with their desktop publishing systems. That program, CorelDraw, was initially released in 1989. CorelDraw 1.x and 2.x ran under Windows 2.x and 3.0. CorelDraw 3.0 came into its own with Microsoft's release of Windows 3.1. The inclusion of TrueType in Windows 3.1 transformed CorelDraw into a serious illustration program capable of using system-installed outline fonts without requiring third-party software such as Adobe Type Manager; paired with a photo-editing program (Corel Photo-Paint), a font manager and several other pieces of software, it was also part of the first all-in-one graphics suite.

5. SVG-edit

SVG-edit

SVG-edit is a web-based free and open-source vector graphics editor. It can be used to create and edit Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) images from within a web browser, not requiring additional software installation.

SVG-edit works in any modern browser

• Firefox 1.5+
• Opera 9.50+
• Safari 4+
• Chrome 1+
• Internet Explorer 6+ had been supported as of version 2.6 (with the Chrome Frame plugin) and may still work for some features, but only IE 9+ will be supported going forward.

SVG-edit is a cross-browser web-based, JavaScript-driven web tool, and has also been made into browser addons, such as an addon for Firefox, a Chrome App, and a standalone widget for Opera. An experimental SVG editing extension to MediaWiki uses SVG-edit.

6. Xara Photo & Graphic Designer

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is an image editing program incorporating photo editing and vector illustration tools created by British software company Xara, which was acquired by German company MAGIX AG in 2007, and now operates as a wholly owned subsidiary. Xara Xtreme LX was an earlier open source version for Linux.

The Windows version was previously sold under the names Xara Studio, Xara X and Xara Xtreme, and traces its origin in the late 1980s to a title called ArtWorks for the Acorn Archimedes line of computers using RISC OS. There is a pro version called Xara Designer Pro (formerly Xara Xtreme Pro).

The current commercial version of Xara Photo & Graphic Designer runs only on Windows. Versions up to 4.x can be run on Linux using Wine.

Features

Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is known for its usability and fast renderer. It provides a fully anti-aliased display, advanced gradient fill, and transparency tools.

Among vector editors, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer is considered to be fairly easy to learn, with similarities to CorelDRAW and Inkscape in terms of interface. Alongside the vector illustration tools, Xara Photo & Graphic Designer also includes an integrated photo tool offering manual and automatic photo enhance, cropping, adjustment of brightness levels, red-eye fix, 'magic' erase, photo healing, color and background erase, panoramas and content aware resizing. Designer Pro includes a wider range of tools for other design tasks including the creation of web pages and websites, and text and page layout tools for DTP with the aim of providing a single solution for all graphic and web design tasks.