This isnt the first time Ive had a rant about Illustrator or Adobe apps in general but as Iv’e been designing some logos in Illustrator this past week and its irked me on a few occasions I thought Id share my most recent disagreements with Illustrator.

Yes, of course Illustrator has had more development time and presumably money given to it and it does indeed feel like a more polished app than Freehand (which by the way I first used at version 0.97 beta - US version. I think that was after Cricket Draw, the precursor to Quark). Freehand is also of course dead, Adobe bought Macromedia and killed it off. Finally for this little precursor to my whinging - Freehand was in my opinion at its best in version 8/9 and since then their illustration app arms race with Illustrator has just meant that its become more bloated, confusing and Illustrator-like.

Freehand never used to have the 2 cursor options which Illustrator introduced - you know, the solid cursor for objects and hollow cursor for objects’ children and points within an object. You used to in Freehand just have one cursor too and hold Option to select points within it or objects within a group - easy. Now with both Illustrator and Freehand you have a separate cursor, the hollow cursor, which is used to select these children (hierarchically speaking of course). The problem with this method (particularly that implemented by Adobe) is that you have to select another tool to swap between selecting and moving objects (really, what is the point of a tool seemingly dedicated to moving a whole object) and manipulating items within an object. What this also brings with it is the fickleness of Illustrator’s tools - if you miss what you want to select and instead click next to a line/point and you select either nothing or whats next to it. Theres no quick Tab button (like in Freehand or Quark) which deselects what youve selected, no Tab hides the palettes. If you miss an attempt to click on a point click on the line on an item means you either select the whole item and so cant move that one point or you drag the line between 2 points and your line goes all over the place.

ive also been having trouble just selecting objects to move, with Illustrator being too vigourous with the vertical layering of items, mainly it seems text. Trying to item which is clearly visible under some text, but where the text box area goes over that item means the item is selected not the text. You have to imagine a box around the text and then click outside of that but still over the item. The “select next item below” contextual item seems useless in this case. Quark’s system of holding Apple-Alt-Shift (I think it was again Option in Freehand) and clicking then cycles through these objects is much better.

Finally, the one thing that Illustrator should be great at - being after all illustration software is the drawing of the lines and curves and various bezier points. Firstly Freehand, which was and still is great at this - There’s two ways of getting a decent curve in Freehand: 1. Use the Bezigon tool (The one to the right of the pen tool here) and again hold down Option (seemingly the magic Freehand key) as you draw a shape, clicking for the points and using minimal points. Then you just use the cursor to tidy up your object as Freehand initially auto draws the bezier points, smoothing the curves and bezier handles out rather nicely; 2. This one is similar to Illustrator but for me just creates much nicer, smooth, less wayward and jagedy curves. Using the Pen tool (the one in that screen shot) just click for points and drag to create the bezier curve and its handles. Pulling the handle further from the point extends the curve. When the shape is drawn again just tidy it up. Now maybe Im wrong but I get much better curves from Freehand Than I do from Illustrator with much less fuss and hair pulling. Freehand just seems to do it whilst Illustrator is a struggle to achieve these nice smooth curves. So either Freehand has a better bezier engine or Im using Illustrator badly.

There’s plenty more that annoys me about Illustrator like: the cluttered interface; the myriad of ways of doing one thing; the inconsistencies bet it and Photoshop (take for example the great way of changing opacity in Photoshop of just clicking your mouse next to one of the percentage drop downs and simply dragging your mouse left and right. Why doesn’t that work in Illustrator?!); the broken integration between Illustrator and Photoshop where dragging/copy & pasting from Illustrator to Photoshop seems to sometimes work but if the drawing is too complicated it just falls apart. However, I wont go about those right away.

A lot of these problems (as I see them) with Illustrator have also crept into InDesign which seems to me to be simply Illustrator with a few better text options and not a lot else. How people can prefer working in it (regardless of the few bugs in Quark, but rather as a working environment) is beyond me - its just too damn finicky and fussy. But that’s probably best left for another post once I’ve used InDesign some more.

So then, is Freehand really better Illustrator? Well, as Freehand’s had no development for the past few years and even then it was a bit flakey and rough around the edges - probably not. Adobe - take a step back and remove some of the clutter from Illustrator, have your developers and artists use an old version of Freehand and learn from its simplicity. We really don’t need half the crap you’ve stuffed in Illustrator and how the hell do I edit styles and why cant I easy do tints of a process colour?