Sunset
Inspired by @dalmaer.
This is my first comic using Adobe Illustrator CS3. First impressions:
- Illustrator is very expensive, so it had better kick ass.
- Keybindings are highly unexpected and surprising, not like other graphics apps I’ve used. Why not Ctrl-D to duplicate the selection? Or Esc to unselect?
- Selecting was awkward in many ways.
- I really found myself wishing I could easily drag with the mouse to pan around.
- I really missed Xara’s ability to draw gradients and transparencies by simply dragging interactively on the drawing, rather than clicking through tiny little popup windows.
- Drawing lines, like the arms on the little people, did some unexpected fills between points, obscuring graphics beneath.
- Export to PNG is broken. Wow, unbelievable. Regardless of the resolution I tried, I always received an error. I had to copy to the clipboard, and then paste into another program in order to generate the PNG shown above.
- Getting that gradient right was extremely weird, it took quite a long time with many failed trips back and forth between those annoying, tiny little toolbar windows before I figured out how to adjust the colors.
Overall, Illustrator feels very old-school, with lots of tiny menus, toolbars, popups, and tedious context switching. Contrast this with something like Sketchup. First impressions with Sketchup are generally along the lines of: Holy crap…this kicks ass! I have no doubts I could slog through Illustrator and perhaps eventually become proficient, but this is my hobby and should be fun. 
The whole reason I’m looking at other illustration programs is because Xara’s export filters are weak. I’d like to be able to share my original source material, in vector format, so other people can copy, modify, and play with the drawings. Xara’s format is too obscure, and it is unable to export to more common vector formats without bad corruption or crashing.
On the flip side, Xara is an absolute joy to work with, its bitmap exports are first rate, and it is incredibly fast. It uses direct manipulation and mouse dragging whenever possible, avoiding most menus and toolbar windows. There is a new version of Xara that I will definitely try.
Illustrator is probably off my list. I plan to try PhotoShop for the next comic.
Nice. I would just expect another tunnel towards Google’s HQ (besides Adobe’s).;-)
I’m a Xara fan too. Have you tried Inkscape?
I spent about 25 recreating the first image with Inkscape. I love that tool.
http://img.skitch.com/20080518-ktj5kpfxt5idh3br6ys63pmy6j.jpg
I can send you the svg if you are interested.
Have you tried http://osx.iusethis.com/search?q=vectordesigner ?
VectorDesigner appears to only be for that 3% market share platform, aka the Mac.
I can’t defend Illustrator very much because its interface really is dreadful, but in its defense I’ll point out that it’s been around for a long time. In its early days it was basically a gui wrapper for working with the PostScript language. And it still shows its PostScript roots if you look under the hood. Even PDF files are a flavor of PostScript, and PDF is what Illustrator prefers to save its output as. What I think Illustrator was targeted for is things like single page advertisements. It’s strength is doing stuff with text. As for it being expensive, compared to Photoshop it’s a steal; Photoshop is $650 while Illustrator is … WTF?! $600. I swear Illustrator used to be around $150. But that was at our software store at the university where I work; Photoshop was way more expensive that Illustrator, which puzzled me because it actually did a lot more. It’s also interesting to note that InDesign is more or less Adobe’s multi page version of Illustrator; it has the feel of missing some of Illustrator’s features only so that they can maintain that revenue stream.
Dude, I know the guys who first created SketchUp — it was, and is absolutely rules-changing, which Google realized (and now my buds are set for life). SketchUp is to design what modern office software is to writing or calculating. Everyone can design everything – and model it in Google Earth. Everyone should learn to do basic stuff in SketchUp.
Moo
The Pro versions of Xara (which are very much worth the small premium) have good PDF import/export. This is mostly good enough for interoperability with other vector graphics packages – all the Adobe stuff can use PDF as a seamless primary format, for example. Xara will also export to SVG/XPS/Xaml.
What about trying Inkscape?
http://www.inkscape.org/
I’ve tried Inkscape and for me, it’s not even in the same league as other drawing programs. Inkscape is free, but I want *better*.