The Breakroom

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!

Having recently made the switch from Freehand, the workers are slowly learning to love Illustrator while coming to terms with some of its limitations. So in an effort to improve our creation tool of choice, we want to give a shout to the talented folks at Adobe with a list of five things in Illustrator CS that are keeping us up at night. If anyone can offer workarounds for any of the items here, please drop us a line, we would love to hear about them.

5) Inflexible Radial Fills – Coming from Freehand, we were spoiled with radial fills that were completely customizable. Artists could adjust the fill to make it elliptical, change its radius, angle, origin and more quickly and easily. In Illustrator, without doing some serious workarounds, or using gradient meshes, you get circular radial fills… and that’s it. Although we love circles to death, we’d still like to be able to create ellipical or conical radial fills with ease.

4) Finicky Printing – We’re not quite sure what the problem is with printing in Illustrator, but sometimes we have the hardest time. We suspect it might have something to do with certain fonts and the art board, but to be honest, we’re just not sure. All we do know is that sometimes we just can’t get Illustrator to print, and that’s a problem.

3) Forgetful Clipping Masks – Illustrator’s clipping masks are cool once you get the hang of them, although creating them takes more steps than Freehand’s old “Paste Inside” feature. The main problem is that if you take the time to set a stroke, fill, etc. on a shape and then turn that shape into a clipping mask, it would stand to reason that you want that clipping mask to retain its style settings. This isn’t the case however, and the extra steps it takes to re-set a mask’s style takes precious time and mouse clicks.

2) Lazy Multiple-Window Support – As our techniques evolve with ever growing icon sizes we appreciate the ability to view actual size pixel previews in a second window beside our “as-big-as-we-can-get-it” working window a la Photoshop. However it is extremely annoying to have to switch layers on and off again after reopening a file to get it back where it was when we closed it. It would be nice if Illustrator remembered that I want my 1200% window with the grid, my 100% window with no background layer and my 25% window with just the background layer. Oh, and can we please fix the rendering artifacts?

And the top thing about Illustrator that we think needs improving…

1) Selecting Stuff – Without question, the thing that slows our productivity down the most when creating in Illustrator is the simple action of selecting stuff. Even Illustrator veterans like our own David Lanham sometimes have trouble clicking and moving points or determining when to use the “Selection Tool” and when to use the “Direct Selection Tool”.

Want to select and move a single point? Well that involves a minimum of two to three mouse clicks, not a single one like in Freehand. We cannot tell you how many times we’ve had to “Undo” an unintentional move because what we thought was about to happen turned out not to be the case. Some Illustrator users have learned to live with these extra steps and just accept the need to shift-select a point before you really select it. We say, “Come on Adobe! We can do better!”. Just by changing the Direct Selection tool so that we can 1) Click the shape to select it and 2) Click and drag a point would go a long way to helping us get rid of those sleepless nights.

So what do you think? Are you feeling the workers pain or do you agree with that Jedi Master who said “You must unlearn what you have learned!”. Or perhaps you might even have your own additions to the list! Take a minute or two to drop us a line and let us know.

Digg It!

Ever had a great idea for a piece of software but didn’t know anybody in the industry that could build it? Well, thanks to Phill Ryu and a talented team of developers he’s put together, you may now have your chance. Today marks the launch of the My Dream App competition where people submit their ideas for shareware applications and the best 3 ideas become actual, working software.

A panel of judges will narrow the hundreds of ideas submitted down to the 24 most workable, and from there the general public will vote for their three favorites. We are pleased to announce that Gedeon Maheux and David Lanham have been invited to sit on the panel of judges along with Mac legends Steve Wozniak, Guy Kawasaki and best-selling author David Pogue, among others.

This “American Idol” of software promises to be a new and fresh approach to application development and we’re pleased to be able to contribute, even if only in a small way, to its success. Visit the official site for complete contest rules, submit ideas or for more information about the fantastic prize list including slews of iPods, Mac Minis and even MacBooks. Stay tuned folks!

As we recover from an exciting week at WWDC, it seems like a good time to recap what happened during our time in San Francisco.

Of course, it was great to meet up with our wonderful clients. And we really enjoyed meeting new people and putting faces to our online friends. (Congratulations again to the ADA winners!)

An unexpected surprise was to hear in person how much people like the redesign and animations.
Thanks everyone!

One thing that always happens after WWDC: you begin to think about the future. This year, a lot of those thoughts have a huge impact on the icon and interface design community. Now is a good time for us to give some advice.

(As we are under NDA with Apple and other companies, we can’t offer concrete reasons for these opinions, but we assure you that they are well founded.)

For the past few years, we have been anticipating the need for larger and larger graphics in user interfaces. This need is driven by displays with higher densities—in a few years time, our current 100 dpi displays will seem as quaint as a 640×480 VGA display. Simply put, an icon with 128×128 pixels isn’t going to be big enough in this new world of high resolution displays.

One way that we have been “future-proofing” our own work is by designing on a canvas that is larger than the client’s requirements. A good rule of thumb is to work on a canvas that is somewhere between 2x and 8x of the requested size. This goes for application and document icons, toolbars and other media embedded into the application (such as about box graphics.)

A critical part of this workflow is to do the primary design work with vector graphics. Vectors can be easily rasterized to any size. Once a design is complete and rasterized, we touch up the smaller resource sizes as necessary—a 16×16 icon that is generated from high resolution vectors will need more tweaking than a 128×128 icon.

This may seem like overkill, but we are sure that there will be a day when our clients ask for larger versions of the work we’ve done for them. By having source artwork at a larger size, we will be better able to serve these clients. We’ll certainly have to tweak the art and build new files, but this is much simpler (and cost effective) than creating all-new art from scratch.

Be aware that this move to larger graphics is already beginning to occur: the current Windows Vista beta supports 256×256 pixel icons on the desktop.

We will continue to update IconBuilder to support these new sizes and OS requirements. Our current plans are to release a new version with support for Leopard and Vista by the end of this year—giving developers and designers time to adjust their apps before the release of the OS on which they run.

So plan ahead, because the future is closer than you think!