Illustrator Call to DutyAs promised, here is the first of hopefully many such videos showcasing features that I hope Adobe will add to future versions of Illustrator.
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hey Garth, thanks for taking the time to make this. I’ve shot a few of these screencasts myself with the intentions of doing a series, and they do get rather time consuming to produce. Even when I’m recording work I have to do any way, the process does tend to slow my work flow quite a bit.
Anyway, though I don’t use Illustrator much (I find it very unintuitive), I really want to make the effort this year to become more proficient using a vector program and I’m confident your video resource will be very helpful in this regard. You’ve done a good job of showing the shortcomings of AI in just this one tool compared to FH. Hopefully adobe will listen, and those with a solution will hop on board and share their findings.
Thanks again for making the effort.
Much appreciated.
Carlos
This was exactly what we were Twittering about the other day - I had no idea the Polygon tool was so much more powerful in FreeHand. From what I know, you pretty much have the Illustrator version down as far as what you can do with stars/polygons. The Freehand method is much better.
I think this should go to the AI feature request list as well.
I’m glad i’m not the only one mourning poor old freehand’s death…
In fact even if I finally bought an upgrade to CS3, I still use freehand for alle the line work an most of the colouring in my illustrations.
The only gripe I have with Freehand MX is the export to photoshop, wich is a little buggy when it comes to transparency, and produces ugly “halos” around the lines.
I’m trying hard to learn Illustrator, and some of its features are quite impressive, but some of the most basic tools seem unintuitive compared to freehand. CS3 seems much better than CS2 though.
@mooz
It’s true. Freehand was far from perfect. There are plenty of features in Illustrator that trump it. However, when it comes down to simply drawing, Illustrator has many shortcomings that I trust Adobe will address.
Are you familiar with Expression? It has b-spline curve drawing technology that enables you to draw twice as fast as the bezier curves in Freehand and Illustrator. It also has terrific assignable pen and brush strokes, “effect lines” for bursts and such, odometer style controls (very quick to change any numeric setting such as stroke width) and fully adjustable non destructive (by those very same odometer style controls) gaussian blur settings (for raster export). Unfortunately it was bought out by Microsoft and altered forever. It had some excellent features I’ve never seen in other vector drawing programs that I wish other companies would emulate. I use it most every day in my professional work flow.
regarding Expression, Mixrosoft made it a free download after they bought it and before they put it in their creative suite thing… I think v.3.3 was the last one, there’s probably a torrent of it online… Ugly… But great program
THANX GRATH for charging adobe’s citidel!
Freehand rocks illustrator off the merry-go-round! It was sooo much easier to use, and at our agency we had the ‘illys’ and the ‘handers’, we were always taunting each other
when we found something under the hood that was better!
to me ‘ai’ is like the ‘pc’ of programs when ‘fh’ was the ‘mac’.
IT WOULD BE GREAT if the proGRAMMAS would modify Ai with the better
features of FH, like you demonstrated in the vid, but corpoRATIONS
that we’re ’stuck with to draw with’ can’t figure what the fuss’s about…or what these little complaining squeeks are!
mark @
ISM &
BAMm
Garth–
Thanks for taking the time to present these invaluable videos. I’m a long-time champion of Freehand. I find it infinitely more intuitive and useful than Illustrator. I’m looking forward to your future comparisons. I’m sure at some point you’ll include the ‘fit in window’ function as well as the multipage function –two features I depend on, neither of which are available on Illustrator. I hope you have some influence on the software development at Adobe. Until then, I’m hanging on to my FH as though it were gold. Come to think of it, it is.