The Breakroom

For those of you not familiar with the story so far, here is a quick recap. Back on August 23rd we wrote a post of our Top 5 Adobe Illustrator Pet Peeves. Things in Illustrator that either bugged us or were slowing us down in our day-to-day icon making lives. That post was met with a flurry of feedback from frustrated Illustrator users the world over who wrote and shared their thoughts and frustrations as well as offered helpful tips and tricks to work around some of the difficulties we were having.

We are pleased to announce that our posts made an amazing journey from the factory floor all the way to the screen of Philip Guindi, the Product Manager for Adobe Illustrator itself. Mr. Guindi wrote to thank us for providing constructive feedback and to let us know that our concerns have indeed been heard. In particular, Adobe is working hard to improve several areas we mentioned (including forgetful clipping masks), but in particular the ability to make selecting objects and points “easier.” To this we have only one word… hallelujah! Who ever said a stick works better than a carrot anyway?

From our dialog with Mr. Guindi and the Senior Product Manager for Photoshop, John Nack, it seems quite clear that Adobe is committed to making the CS3 versions of Illustrator and Photoshop, upgrades that will matter. We love new features as much as the next guy, and we’re sure there will be many in CS3, but we’d much rather have the existing feature sets be the best they can be. This not only helps save us time and money, but also allows us to crank out icons for clients and fans quickly and effectively.

So from all of the workers, to those at Adobe, our pixel hats go off to you for taking the time to actually listen to your users. We’re looking forward to seeing how our new found friend, Adobe Illustrator, matures and grows in the days and weeks ahead. Kudos!

Every now and then you stumble across something on the Internet that reminds you just how cool it really is. Tonight we came across something that took us right back to our childhoods and we suspect that it will do the same for you.

YouTube plays host to all manner of videos from singing Hoffs to Hypno-Kittys, but we can’t remember the last time we saw the 123 Counting Ball sequence from Sesame Street. Oh, how we loved that ball! Although the alternate ending with the ball being ground to powder is our favorite, this video with its distinct music and intricate set-up put a grin on our faces from ear to ear.

A little more searching revealed other childhood favorites such as the Alligator King, LadyBug Picnic, the surreal journey of the Lost Kid and the classic Pinball Counting Song. A veritable cornucopia of counting that is as fresh in our brains today as it was 25 years ago. We just wanted to share this small discovery with you and hope it makes your day, as it did ours. Enjoy!

A few days ago, word leaked out that the powers that be were planning on re-releasing Star Trek the Original Series with all new and updated special effects. We posted some tantalizing tidbits in the Industry News about this, but were waiting on official word from Paramount. Well, the word has come and all we can say is “Beam us up!”

CBS will begin syndicating all 79 of the re-mastered episodes here in the US, starting as early as September 16th. Some trek purists (our own Dave Brasgalla among them) may have second thoughts about the possibilities of Hollywood brass tampering with the past ala Lucas and the now infamous Han vs. Greedo shootout, but with the news that Michael and Denise Okuda are working on the project, we think things are in more than capable hands. The episodes will feature all new space shots, digitally remastered music, and select corrections of “goofs” from certain episodes. Head over to TV Guide for the full story.

Star Trek has always been close to our hearts and was one of our original inspirations for creating desktop icons. We are pleased as punch to be able to look forward to “new” episodes of the original series. Full speed ahead!

Our recent post, ‘Top 5 Adobe Illustrator Pet Peeves’, struck a chord so loud it broke the glass we were drinking from! Illustrator users everywhere came out in force with their thoughts and suggestions. Most feedback fell along lines of “I agree 100%” or the ever-popular “Deal with it people!” Some however, wrote with very helpful (sometimes sad and funny) tips and tricks that we’d like to share with you today. So without further ado, we present what we’ve learned from people with bigger Illustrator brains than us!

5) Inflexible Radial Fills – Short of using gradient meshes to achieve the look you need, most people suggested starting with a circle and applying a radial fill. Next, deform the circle to an ellipse to get that “oh so elusive” shape for the fill. This works great when you need to fill an ellipse, but what about other geometric or hand-drawn shapes? Gradient Meshes are complicated and overkill for this type of application, but it seems they are all we have for now.

4) Finicky Printing – Of the 5 problem areas we outlined, this one engendered the best responses. Our favorites included “Save the file as a PDF and print it from Acrobat instead!” and “Convert all text to outlines”. Needless to say that if we have to use a second application to print our Illustrator document, something is rotten in Denmark. Converting fonts to non-editable outlines does solve some of these problems, but it defeats the purpose of using fonts in the first place. At any rate its clear that Illustrator just can’t handle certain older Open Type fonts. Time to upgrade our copy of Frutiger from 1998. :-)

3) Forgetful Clipping Masks – The problem of losing style settings when converting to clipping masks is one that no one could offer a work-around for. It seems that there just is no easy way to get the program to remember a shape’s settings when converting to a mask. Here’s hoping Adobe is listening and makes us eat our words when CS3 is released.

2) Lazy Multiple-Window Support – Quick and dirty solutions to the problem of Illustrator not remembering the proper view, came in the form of always remembering to make your last view active before saving and using Command-Y to clear screen rendering artifacts. Hardly elegant solutions to be sure. One user wrote us an action to help us set up our workspaces and we are eager to give it a test run. Thanks George!

1) Selecting Stuff – Solutions to our maniacal dance with the dual selection tools ran the gamut. Many people wrote to say that after many “years” of wrestling with the program, they finally got used to it. Others suggested clever tricks such as using the ‘Lock All Deselected’ command (Command+Option+2) to avoid selecting incorrect shapes and paths. Knowing your keyboard shortcuts for switching tools is always helpful as well and seems to be a necessity for the constant need to go from Pen to Direct Select tool and back again.

Other users’ pet peeves included:

• Align Points – The ability to align points in addition to shapes.
• Performance Issues – Increasing use of raster effects and larger pixel dimensions means Illustrator is starting to crawl. Judging from all the mail we received, an Intel version would make a whole lot of people happy.
• Improved Save for Web – Illustrator lags behind Photoshop with its ‘Save for Web’ panel which could stand more finely tuned controls.
• No Dock Menu Support – Illustrator doesn’t support navigation of open files via the Dock Menu. Why? Your guess is as good as ours.

And the solution to these problems? One user wrote in to suggest: “Complain bitterly on the Adobe Illustrator Support Forums.” We like to think that a carrot gets better results than a stick, but we also know that the squeaky wheel gets the grease, so some gentle urging may be just what the doctor ordered. Whoa, that’s one too many cliches even for us! We hope you enjoyed our side trip into Adobe land, thanks to all who wrote in, now back to making icons!