Re: Adobe vs Alternatives
MyCoalescen,
Many assumptions in digital graphics work stem from self-perpetuating conventional-wisdom driven primarily by the continued market domination of Adobe. This is not healthy for the trade. I applaud your daring to think a little differently.
Just so you'll know where I'm coming from: I've been doing commercial graphics of one kind or another for my whole working life (except for a fondly treasured four years working at a motorcycle shop back in my young & foolish days). Prior to the "desktop publishing revolution" of the 80s, my primary illustration tool for magazine ads, company product collateral, etc., etc. was an Iwata airbrush because that was the "tool to have" and the current "technology to know." I've worked litho process cameras, set type on an optical Compugraphic typesetter, done color separations on a 35mm SLR, can construct isometric, dimetric, and trimetric "on the board", and can still twirl a lettering quill alongside the best of 'em. I was among the earliest adopters of the desktop graphics technology and among the earliest daring to use color-capable Macs for producing color-separated work, before the arrival of so-called color management. For a period of about ten years, my wife and I operated our own freelance illustration/design business and did comfortably well with it while raising two kids. Both before and after that, I've always considered it a matter of professional necessity and personal fulfillment to maintain my own licenses of, and at least working familiarity with, most of the mainstream graphics softwares.
If there's one thing I've learned it's that tools change. And vector graphics is long overdue for a change from Adobe-perpetuated conventional wisdom. The continued market domination of Illustrator has always been brand-recognition driven, not quality-driven, and has set vector drawing back by decades.
Understand: I say this quite pragmatically and calmly without any malice or stomach acid drip or "hatred" toward Adobe or its employees or fellow users or any other emotional axe-to-grind. The vector drawing segment is simply in the doldrums. This is the 21st century. We've seen dramatic software advancements, especially in 3D modeling associated with the gaming industry. Google and opensource are delivering powerful graphics tools with capability both matching the offerings of the traditional business model and exceeding them with functional innovation. Things like WordPress and Joomla provide robust web-centric design capability at low or no cost.
Adobe's take-it-or-leave-it rent-only licensing scheme is defended by claims of targeting its ostensibly "professional" customer base, even while anyone can see the Illustrator forums increasingly populated by posts asking the most inane questions revealing a complete ignorance of even the most basic conceptual understanding of the program (or vector-based drawing in general) and a complete unwillingness to read a single sentence of product documentation.
Meanwhile, young people getting serious in other graphics-related segments just don't think in terms of emotion- and habit-driven dependency on single monolithic vendors anymore. They look at the old mainstream graphics programs and just yawn. They aren't intimidated by adapting to slightly different interfaces; they aren't afraid of doing a little Javascript or SQL coding, and the need is rapidly increasing for practical and robust data-driven graphics capability in print as well as for web.
Yet the continued domination of Adobe's products has other promising brands like Xara and Serif still seemingly stuck in the mode of playing feature-by-feature "me, too"; still trying to catch up to the merely foundational features of the old-world mainstays (Illustrator, FreeHand, Draw, Canvas), as if that's all there is to which to aspire. Interface design more elegant than Illustrator is easy. Actual functional innovation should be easy too, but is sadly rare and too long in coming. Room for improvement is immesurable. Yet, for one immediate example, as admirable as Xara Designer Pro is and as much as I'd like to see it flourish, it still lacks the most fundamental feature: a primary path drawing tool on par with what's been standard fare for almost 30 years.
I know it's easier to say than to do, but someone needs to quickly step up and outside the "like Adobe Illustrator" box and take serious, industrial-strength vector drawing to the next level. Adobe's customer-dependency-perpetuating licensing blunder provides an historic opportunity. Users and commercial software vendors alike should see the situation as a long-awaited chance to break the mold--and Adobe's stranglehold on an industry. The first one to apply the energy to seriously raise the vector drawing functional bar wins.
But until then we're still left comparing conventional-wisdom functionality, to wit:
I dare say if the vast majority of creative content illustrator/designers--whether freelancing, employed in in-house marketing departments or at contract creative agencies--were to objectively evaluate the kinds of projects they handle in a typical year, the overwhelming bulk of print projects would be ads and marketing collateral (single-sheet or low-page-count graphics-intensive brochures, fliers, medium-to-large format displays, etc.), not high page-count "bookish" publications with repetitive layouts, long threaded text stories, tables of contents, indexes, etc.
So regarding current 2D print-centric software: Much has to do with whether you consider yourself primarily an illustration/design content creator (you mention aspiration to specialize in branding) or a page designer/assembler for relatively high page-count "bookish" publications.
There are plenty of vector drawing programs (at least on the Windows platform--let's get that matter put to bed) to consider. But when it comes to single-vendor dependency (which I strongly advise against) you'll find that the "missing element" among the current non-Adobe offerings is in the realm of page-assembly programs.
We do have recourse to Quark xPress as a sound option. But your initial post (and similar questions from many others in many places) seems to assume the desire for a single-vendor "suite" or bundle. Right now, that just ain't happenin'.
Corel Draw Graphics Suite (or Corel Draw Technical Suite) is currently the strongest single-vendor contender, since PhotoPaint is an established and perfectly viable substitute for Photoshop. But even though Draw's multi-page capability has been around much longer than Illustrator's ; there is no long-document page-layout program in the bundle. It's been suggested that Corel might do well to dust off and renew Vendura Publisher. (I have no idea about the practicability of ressurrecting an old program to current OSes as opposed to starting over.)
Canvas is also still a very good and too-often overlooked contender for serious illustration. It offers CAD-like accuracy and some vertical-market features (GIS) which make it worth having in my toolbox regardless. But again; like Draw, Illustrator, and all the rest, while capable of the majority of projects, it's not really intended or suitable for long bookish documents.
Xara Designer Pro's recent multi-page enhancements are welcome, and bring Designer Pro closer-to-par with other drawing programs. But I have serious doubts about its actual viability for large documents.
Serif is one to watch, since it has its dedicated PagePlus. And I'm enthusiastic about some of the features in and interface design of DrawPlus. But that enthusiasm is immediately and frustratingly stiffled. Serif has got to get serious about quality control before release. DrawPlus 6 has too many depressingly obvious and debilitating interface bugs.
Opensource Inkscape is far more capable than far too many assume. (It's a curious truth about human nature that most people just don't appreciate what they don't pay for.) Again, there's no long-document practicality here. There are some opensource offerings in the page-layout genre, though.
So what's an Adobe alternative seeker to do? Simple: Give up on the whole single-vendor fixation and enjoy the benefits of freedom of choice. The "functional integration" of Adobe's programs has always been more myth than substance.
Frankly, I'd much rather see a whole new approach to the antequated page-layout concept anyway. PDF has now long been the preferred delivery format, and is a game-leveler that is yet to be fully exploited. For example, I just completed a 1000-page catalog project built entirely upon FileMaker Pro (a relational database program) with no conventional-wisdom "page layout" application even involved. Now built, those tasked with maintaining the catalog focus entirely on raw data entry in interfaces optimized specifically for that. Print-ready layouts for whole chapters are entirely automated and accomplished literally in seconds. An update of the whole catalog can be regenerated at any time in 30 minutes. The catalog can be delivered not just for print, but as a set of bite-size downloadable PDFs, as a website automatically-generated on-the-fly, as data to populate a website via PHP, as an iOS application, and/or even as a full-functioned, royalty-free standalone database browsing application.
Contrary to pundit predictions from decades ago, print is not dead. But the old "page layout" software paradigms (both the PageMaker/xPress/InDesign model for print and the GoLive/Dreamweaver model for web) aren't getting any younger.
That said, I'll now set long bookish document assembly aside:
Contrary to largely Adobesque misconception, for illustration and print-ready production of most everything except bookish publications, a good vector drawing program is quite often--even usually--advantageous over what too many automatically assume as the conventional-wisdom norm. The simple truth is, page-layout programs are all about semi-automation of repetitive layouts by features like master pages, character- and paragraph-level styles, robust handling of many external links, long text threads, TOC generation, etc., etc. It's simply expedient and creativity-enhancing for everything on the page(s)--at least other than raster images--to be native to the program, rather than treating all things vector as spot graphics desitined for importing into another program just to put it in a "page-layout container." You don't have to take everything to a page-layout program just to make a print-ready PDF. You can go straight to PDF from the drawing program you happen to consider most advantageous for the project at hand.
The operative word in the above is "good" vector drawing program. Just about any decent vector drawing program is a viable substitute for Illustrator. Consider:
>During their entire co-existence, Illustrator's primary competitor, FreeHand, consistently outperformed and out-featured Illustrator. That continued until Adobe acquired Macromedia and subsequently removed FreeHand from the market.
>Illustrator has chronically been years late-to-the-game in most practical advancements in vector drawing. The list of examples is quite long.
>Illustrator only relatively recently acquired the ability to have more than one page ("Artboard") in a document. It was literally decades behind its three primarly competitors (FreeHand, Draw, Canvas) in this regard, and its implementation is still cumbersome in comparison to FreeHand's despite Adobe's now owning the rights to FreeHand's interface designs. The same is true of its Perspective Grid and other half-baked copies of FreeHand features.
>Illustrator's text engine and text handling interface are simply hideous, despite their OpenType support; mirroring that of Photoshop's rather than InDesign's.
>Illustrator's archaic interface is still stuck in the 80s. Cumbersome, scattered, confused, inefficient, inconsistent, ambiguous, and replete with antequated modal dialogs. In short, it is the least elegant drawing program of all. That makes it more difficult to learn by newcomers than any of the others. And because it so dogmatically clings to its most problematic interface foundations, once newcomers becomes workaday familiar, they are all the more fearful of trying something different. It's a self-perpetuating cycle. Again, this is not emotional criticism; it's just demonstrable fact.
>Illustrator is still missing many no-brainer features long taken for granted in other drawing programs.
Yes, there are a few Illustrator-favoring exceptions. One particularly important is user-automation, and this is one area which keeps companies like Xara and Serif in the "hobbyist" category in the graphics community mindshare. Draw, Canvas, and Illustrator provide for macros (user recording and playback of standard interface features). Of those, Canvas's macro capability is better than Illustrator's Actions.
But only Draw provides comparable scripting (user-coding of the program's underlying functionality beyond restriction to the program's interface) and this is another compelling reason to favor Draw (or Corel Designer) as the primary alternative to Illustrator. Illustrator provides scripting models for Javascript, VBA, and AppleScript. Draw offers only VBA, but Draw users have been leveraging it since long before Illustrator became scriptable, and there's some quite elegant and powerful examples out there.
So my advice, MyCoalescen, is:
>Be aware that change is certain.
>Don't lock yourself into a single-vendor dependency for your livelihood. Don't just give up on, but avoid single-vendor dependency for your entire set of graphics tools.
>Maximize your skillset. Obtain a working familiary with as many tools as you can get your hands on.
>Take advantage of the many competitive side-grade offers. A full license to another program can often be had for less than the price of a single Illustrator third-party plug-in, and you get a lot more tools and skillset enhancement in the deal.
>Watch the "upstarts" and think about where true innovation really begins. Ever heard of Satellite 3D? It was the precursor of Adobe Dimensions, which in turn is the now defunct basis of Illustrator's dumbed-down 3D Effect. Ever heard of SmartDraw? It was the progenitor Macromedia Flash, which in turn was acquired by Adobe and turned into probably the most confused product line ever. Adobe gets too much credit for "innovation" that actually occurred elsewhere.
>Concentrate on understanding the principles upon which software interfaces work, rather than merely memorizing the specific interface scheme and layout of a pet program. That will give you the competitve advantages of deeper proficiency and versatility and ability to avoid the fear of learning something different from the current "everybody's favorite."
JET
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