Corporate IT departments—whether for large companies, or for small ones, have to justify the purchase of software packages to higher ups. Bean counters, as it were. One of the hardest software justifications to buy is something that isn’t clearly business related. Getting a new version of Excel is easy; a word processor is a word processor for the most part, and you can use Open Office to get most basic business functions out there for free.
Justifying a high end vector graphics program is a harder sell job than this, except in certain types of companies with art departments. Even then, the art department probably has to whine a bit to get the latest version.
Here’s what can help justify an Adobe Illustrator purchase or two for an organization.
First, there’s making brochures and promotional materials. Anyone who’s tried to do complex text flow layouts in Microsoft Word, or tried to scale up a business logo in MS Paint and file all the jagged edges off has a legitimate need for Adobe Illustrator CS4 on their workstation Provided you have the personnel to use it, having someone in house who can do the basics in Illustrator, including making business cards and three fold brochures, can save you a lot of money in third party art costs. Even better, if you’re going to be going to offset printing, Illustrator is the industry standard vector art program, and does color separations better than any other program on the market.
Second, presentations. Lots of companies make presentations out there – either with Power Point slides or with graphs and data visualizations. Yes, Power Point allows compositing several items together for a slide show. Excel has a graphing function…and both of them have the inherent sense and sensibility of a Stalinist propaganda piece, with very little control over fonts, spacing or even making your graphing series presentable. If your business relies on communicating through graphical data to convey technical concepts – from performance plots to tree charts, Adobe Illustrator gives you a competitive edge. Adobe Illustrator allows you to place lines and grid points with vastly greater precision and more options than anything in Excel.
Third, and finally, there’s encouraging creativity. American businesses need to nurture and harbor creative thinking, and it’s been proven that giving people two hours each week to ‘goof off’ with a piece of design software are more productive, and about 70% of the time, that design software ‘goofing off’ turns into a new marketing program or a product that’s worth bringing to market.
All of these choices assume fairly conventional businesses. Any business in the publishing field is already using Illustrator for compositing text and effects on book cover art, and doing layout for tee shirt printing, and any of the other client-facing tasks that design houses routinely do.
