Adobe Illustrator’s pen tool is a foundational method for teaching and creating vector graphics. It functions as a visual “what you see is what you get” system for operating Adobe’s proprietary PostScript page-description language. Illustrator was introduced in 1987, during the first phase of the desktop publishing revolution, advertised with the tagline: “Now A Work of Art Doesn't Have to Be A Lot of Work." But, what exactly is the pen tool and how does it attempt to automate the "work of art"?

“What is the Pen Tool?” applies a materialist analysis to the tools of illustration, demonstrating how automation deskills illustrators by smoothing and standardizing the unruly contours of creative labor.

Popular histories of the desktop publishing revolution characterize the implementation of digital software as democratizing and inevitable. But, contemporaneous accounts reveal that the emergence of our current mode of digital production was continually contested.