Illustrator is one of the best vector illustration tools, but with its hefty Adobe price tag, you might want an alternative.

Even though NVidia and ATI have been open-source ... the ORSoC graphics card around a Digilent Atlys FPGA dev board. So far, he can draw lines, textured triangles, bitmap or vector fonts, and ...

and works seamlessly with Adobe's other software. It's not free, like the options below, but it's the best tool money can buy. Open source vector graphics package Inkscape is staggeringly powerful ...