Do you wish Illustrator still started up showing the classic artwork The Birth of Venus by Sandro Botticelli? You can easily fix that!
The Birth of Venus is a famous 1480s painting by Italian artist Sandro Botticelli and it is on display in the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, Italy. This art is strongly associated with Adobe Illustrator, and was incorporated into its splash screen from the very first version in 1987 up to version 10 in the year 2001. It stopped being used in the CS series from 2003 on.
Many long-time users of Illustrator wish that the opening splash screen still featured the classic Botticelli Venus artwork, as all the early versions of Illustrator did. It is actually easy to replace or modify the splash screen artwork in Illustrator. The steps below would also be valid for customizing any custom artwork of your choosing into the splash screen of Illustrator.
Find the files
Open your Windows File Explorer to this location:
C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Illustrator 2026\Support Files\Contents\Windows
Or open your macOS Finder to this location:
/Applications/Adobe Illustrator 2026/Adobe Illustrator.app/Contents/Resources
Find these 3 files:
ai_cc_splash.png
Edit copies of the files
Copy these three files to some other location where you can open and edit them in Photoshop. I copied them to the Desktop, for example.
Open each of the three files in Photoshop and make any changes you like. In my example, I added Botticelli's Venus painting to fill each 3x2 ratio image. Bring this image in by File > Place Embedded or copy n paste or drag n drop. Edit the art to suit yourself. Save it as a PSD if you want to keep it as a future resource. Export for web as a PNG8 file with transparency. The filenames of all three files must remain the same.
Once you have edited all three files and made new splash screen files, copy them back into the macOS or Windows application location and restart Illustrator. You will see your customized splash screen for a few seconds as Illustrator loads up. That's better!
That is all it takes to have your Botticelli Venus artwork as a splash screen in Illustrator.
Or download my pre-made files
Alternatively, a quicker shortcut would be to download these three ready-made splash screen files and copy them into the above-mentioned correct folder. This Venus custom splash screen file is available in a full-canvas example and a close-up canvas example. Download and un-compress this free zip file now!
Adobe Illustrator version 10
November 2001, version 10: The last version of Illustrator to feature a variation on the Venus artwork.
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