Early Award-winning Vector Illustration – High Performance

An Award-winning Vector Illustration from the Dawn of the Desktop Publishing Era

This award-winning vector illustration was created in 1987 by Michael Scaramozzino as DreamLight's first masterpiece. Michael drew this PostScript illustration in the very first version of Adobe Illustrator 1.1 as a promotional piece for the launch of his new computer graphics studio — DreamLight Incorporated. Adobe Illustrator, which allowed creating drawings in the PostScript graphics language, shipped in 1987 and opened up a whole new world of digital illustration capabilities just as DreamLight Incorporated was launched.

The vector illustration was created by layering hundreds of individual shapes on top of each other to create the shading because this was before Adobe Illustrator could do blending or graduated fills. The finished illustration was then composited together with typesetting in Aldus Pagemaker. This award-winning vector illustration was created on a black and white 1MB Macintosh Plus with a 20MB SCSI hard drive using a Sumagraphics drawing tablet and a full page 1-bit B&W Xerox display attached to the Mac Plus CPU with a Nutmeg video adapter. The image was output on a Linotronic 300 Imagesetter at 1,270 lines per inch directly to film for use in printing promotional posters for the studio's initial opening. The technicians at the type setting service bureau that originally output the illustration were amazed to see this high resolution image come out of the imagesetter that was traditionally used for simple type setting at the time.

Michael sent copies of the poster to the presidents of the two leading graphics software developers of the time, Aldus and Adobe. Paul Brainerd, the President of Aldus then contacted him and sent him a copy of their soon to be released drawing software, Aldus FreeHand, that would they would use to compete with Adobe Illustrator. He wanted to see what Michael could create in FreeHand. That's when Michael began work on his next masterpiece – Lucid Beginnings.

Awards & Publications

The High Performance vector illustration won first prize for technical illustration in Macworld's first Macintosh Masters Art Contest in 1988. It was also exhibited in the Northampton School of Design's State-Of-The-Art Show and was widely published in books, magazines and newsletters thereafter including the following: Macworld & MacUser magazines, The Verbum Book of Postscript Illustration, Illustrator 7 Complete book, Click - The Brightest in Computer Generated Design and Illustration an oversized hard-cover coffee table book and MacArtist - The Newsletter for Macintosh Artists.