Path

Jan 9 2008

Artist, Von Glitschka, writes an open letter to Adobe Illustrator users

Professional illustrator and author, Von Glitschka of The Illustrative Designer Podcast is a buddy I met on Twitter. Anyone who follows “Vonster” knows he has a love/hate relationship with Adobe Illustrator. I believe his frustration mainly stems from his love for Macromedia Freehand and his hatred for the way Adobe has alienated its faithful users.

I guess things have come to a head for Von and he would like your help in getting Adobe to accept the fact that Freehand had a lot of excellent and superior features. He has written an open letter (after the jump) to Adobe Illustrator users and especially Freehand refugees urging them to post feature requests for Adobe Illustrator CS4 to Adobe’s Feature Request/Bug Report Form page. Von has included a few of his own “most wished for” features to get you started.

If you want better software, you gotta ask for it!!
Here’s Von Glitschka in his own words:

Hey everyone. Well most of you know I had to make the switch from FreeHand to AI over the past few years and thankfully that painful transition is pretty much over now. FreeHand may never grace my hard drive again but I’ve accepted that sad fact and have moved on.

That said, I’ve used both and I’ve been using CS3 since it was released and was told by an Adobe project manager that if they get enough requests via their request form for certain features, they seriously consider implementing them.

So here are a few features I’d love to see in CS4 which would make all of our jobs easier and make for more intuitive building in Illustrator. If you agree could you visit the link below and send Adobe these as well as any others you think is needed using their wish form? I’d appreciate you taking a few minutes to do this. If you have others I’d like to hear them too.

New Feature Requests

• Transparent Color Swatch: So we can blend from a color to transparent. (Like in Photoshop and Flash) No need for the wonky opacity mask that won’t work in smart objects anyway so it’s somewhat useless.
• Layer Tags: Simple tag “Layers” or “Layer Groups” with a tag like “PDF” and then if you save out as a PDF it creates a multi-page PDF using only the tagged layers in order.
• Sub Selection of Content: The ability to sub-select down through content without having to hide, turn on/off layers in the layers palette, send to back or any of the other work around we have to do to get to the art we want to edit buried under other items in our work. Reference FreeHand for how simple this could be.
• Preview Path: Show path as you build vectors. (See FreeHand) Right now I have to commit to a final location of a point before I see how the shape of the path following it is effected. This is counter productive and just bloats build time.

Functionality Improvement Requests

• Modify snapping performance on Objects. Right now it’s based on cursor location rather then point location. That is just nuts and makes editing art a pain in the keester.
• Create a pref that by default sets the alignment tool to automatically align based on larger item selected. Having to do the second option click is just a waste of time.
• Make pathfinder functions expand automatically by default. If people prefer not to do this then have it a pref we can turn on/off. (Like most functions let us decide, don’t dictate it)
• Non-Breaking Path Pref: A pref we can turn on/off to prevent paths from being able to be accidently pulled off a shape. (Why they even have this function is beyond me? It’s just simply stupid. I still have yet to hear anyone explain why you’d want to do this to begin with?)
• Masked Items Pref: Build in a preference that allows users to turn on/off the ability to click on masked items outside the masked area. Kind of defeats the purpose of a mask if you can still click on the hidden areas Adobe.
• When copying out or sizing content that has larger content masked into smaller shapes within my art it bases the bounding box off the hidden masked content. This is a major pain in the ass and the way Adobe has chosen to handle the functionality is just moronic. Fix it.

Submit your feature requests here

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/mmform/index.cfm?name=wishform

Von R. Glitschka, Illustrative Designer
Glitschka Studios

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