God bless John Warnoc. For without his creation, the Postscript language, we designers may still be dealing with rubber cement, stat cameras, proportion wheels, and yes, the dreaded rapidograph (god, I hated those things).

Warnak’s Postscript was the mathematical engine that let designers translate what was on their screen to the printed page. Its magic was resolution independence. Regardless of scale, artwork or letterforms were always razor sharp. Postscript led directly to the creation of Adobe Illustrator – still the go-to application for virtually every graphic designer on the planet (and where I spend 80% of my time).

Terry Hemphill’s love story to Illustrator, The Adobe Illustrator Story, details its conception, its rise and its meaning to the world of design and beyond.

I’d argue that it was Adobe that did more to ingratiate the Mac as a design tool than, well, the Mac itself. Warnac was to Jobs and the Mac what Gates was to DOS and the PC.

I recall being so mesmerized by Illustrator, that when we finally got it on our first office computer (v.1.1) , I returned the office that night to get some time to experiment with it – on Christmas eve 1987!

Oh, and if you miss those old school design tools, you can still visit them at the forgotten art supplies website