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Adobe Illustrator just got the holy grail of illustration tools
The introduction of Adobe's Turntable tool in Illustrator represents a significant advancement in brand strategy for creative professionals, as it leverages generative AI to streamline the illustration process, allowing for faster and more efficient creation of 3D assets from 2D designs. This innovation not only enhances productivity but also raises questions about the future role of human illustrators in a landscape increasingly dominated by AI technologies, prompting brands to consider how they can balance technological advancements with the value of human creativity.
FastCompany: At last, after seven months of public beta testing, Turntable is available today in the latest release of Adobe Illustrator. Presented at the 2024 edition of the Adobe Max conference as a sneak preview, the tool uses generative AI to transform any 2D vector illustration into a 3D object that you can turn around its vertical axis, as if it were on a clay modeling turntable. When it came out, its magicks left every Illustrator user cheering. If you have ever used Illustrator to craft a vector illustration—from a logo design to an animation character—it’s understandable why people were so excited.
“The idea for Turntable originated from a consistent theme we heard directly from customers around the time and effort required to manually redraw characters and illustrations from multiple angles, often taking hours,” says Deepa Subramaniam, Adobe’s Vice President of Product Marketing for Creative Professionals. It’s a perfect use case of generative AI actually helping human creators to save an incredible amount of time without sacrificing their artistic vision. To understand Turntable’s wow factor, you need to understand why it is so hard to modify a 2D illustration.
Drawing something complex with a stylus and a tablet using Photoshop requires very little time. It is as easy as drawing it with pencils and a notepad. But with Photoshop you can’t zoom in or out of a drawing infinitely without seeing pixels and jagged curves. With Illustrator, you can zoom-in infinitely, and it will always look perfectly smooth, but that benefit comes at a very high time cost.
Unlike raster hand drawing, it’s very hard to create an image using mathematical lines and fills, requiring you to endlessly pull from little handles that shape curves add or subtract basic geometry like rectangles and ovals into a new, more complex shape. Doing that again and again, to change the perspective of a faux 3D object, or to create 40 different versions of a 2D character from different angles, is truly maddening.
That is precisely why people love Turntable, a generative AI technology that runs in Adobe’s Creative Cloud to interpret what your mess of lines and shapes is—let’s say, an astronaut—and rotate it around 360 degrees to show its sides or back without you ever having to redraw the entire thing, all while keeping its infinitely-zoomable vector nature. Vital time saver When you feed a flat vector into this engine, it does not just blindly stretch the image.
It perceives your mathematical anchors and curves like a constellation of stars mapped on a cosmic grid, intelligently recalculating the coordinates to reveal the hidden sides of the universe you built. The sheer shock of seeing an algorithm correctly guess the unseen geometry of a flat drawing stunned the industry. As the editorial team at CreativePro Network noted when it came out, the collective reaction “was a fascinating mix of pure shock, genuine excitement, and a healthy dose of professional skepticism.” Unlike the messy chaos of prompt-driven image generators that vomit random pixels, this utility has a laser-focused mandate.
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The introduction of Adobe's Turntable tool represents a significant advancement in illustration technology that could reshape brand strategies, making it highly impactful and relevant, while also being a notable but not entirely unprecedented innovation in AI design.