Re: Image and text skewing / distorting megathread
Technically speaking, stretching and skewing text to make wide/narrow/italic versions of typefaces has always been frowned upon in the design industry as an ethics concern: it destroys the lines another artist slaved over to achieve the look of their font and largely any professional designer will use stretched text as a prime indicator of a novice designer or someone who has no knowledge of typography at all. Is it right to do this? I can see both sides of the argument. On one hand, we have easy access to distort things and therefore should be able to; it's up to the designer. However on the flip side, I have yet to run across a stretched/skewed font that actually looked good to me, but again, I"m not the average viewer, I know what I'm looking at beyond just 'what it looks like'.Originally Posted by angelize
I think Xara might have made taken an initiative which makes their software in general look less like amateurs use it by removing the ability for an amateur decision/mistake to thoughtlessly happen. Again, I don't think it's right or wrong and the software itself needs a money injection to get some cooporation with the rest of the 'cool kids' in softwareland and if less ugly output is the default operation, then maybe that's a good decision overall for the company and maybe for us users actually use/need the more professional-centric/industry friendly stuff like pantone, real EPS scripting/compatibility, HTML5/javascript integration, etc.
Keep in mind, I'm not making any arguments from an interface standpoint here and Xara's general design interface is still lightyears ahead of the nearest competition in terms of usability IF YOU ARE AN ARTIST which is most important to me and it's biggest strength; it's competition puts faux 'professional' look on with endless menus and use-once-in-a-blue-moon features and completely forgets real artists want to make things with their software. However, the problem persists that Adobe is seen as the only game in town because they were first to the party, for better or worse, and so much more talented people use their inferior workflow which gives the impression that photoshop/illustrator are actually better but in reality, at best they're mediocre and at worst a complicated nightmare of legacy decisions that make no sense.
As long as Xara can encourage good artwork from people, whether it be by silently making decisions for novices to not stretch font because professionals can see that lack of expertise a mile away, it makes them look better and so forth and so on. It's really painful to see Xara in the state it's in where it's got the best damn workflow and ideals about 'let the artist make art' this side of the computer revolution, but not enough recognition in professional circles to create a real user base made of high-level artists that can show off what it can do at it's maximum potential. Couple that into the fact most people using a computer aren't exactly computer literate and therefore only have enough mental energy to learn one thing, and it's almost like Xara HAS to go after novices in order to get any traction and focus on the next generation and maybe part of that is, again, removing anything that will in effect make Xara look like a crap program by producing crap typography.
And no, my beef isn't with Xara, it's with the general computer industry and people using computers whether by force or choice who refuse to really get to understand their machine and the fact that 95% of software functions are overlapping and any 'features' have more to do with workflow moreso than capabilities; capabilities are what the user brings, not the software in most cases when it comes to producing an image. Everything else is just 'how easy is it to get this to a press/on a website' via how many steps/conversions/testing/refining. Adobe's only advantage is the latter because they suck face with big firms and equipment manufacturers to gain that 'edge'.
Sorry to seem a little curt/frank/blunt...considering the things Xara could be doing to work more like Adobe garbage, I see this as the least offensive thing they could ever do in that regard.
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Acorn - installed Xara software: Cloud+/Pro+ and most others back through time (to CC's Artworks). Contact for technical remediation/consultancy for your web designs.
If you have anything else you want me to look into, please either PM me or start a new thread, let's keep this to text and image distortion issues.
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