Sad News for the Designer in All of Us

19 May 2005 9:47:41

Maybe I’m a little behind when it comes to breaking news (I don’t watch television and our newspaper subscription expired a few weeks back—yeah, I need to take care of that) so I am just now stunned by the fact that Adobe is going to buy out Macromedia.

Design school was not that long ago in my life, and I can remember before my “formal” education spending hours trying to figure out the simplest of processes in Adobe’s Illustrator. I’ve obviously come quite far since then and Illustrator is without question the most indispensable tool I have for creating illustrations of just about any type—except web layouts.

Macromedia has been developing Fireworks for at least as long as I’ve been doing web deign and frankly, there isn’t a better program available. Illustrator’s tools just aren’t as robust or smooth when it comes to the pixel precision required on the web. In print, Illustrator shines because of its control over dpi, points and typography; but on the web, everything is about the pixel, and Illustrator was never originally designed to handle pixels.

Throw in the wonderfully streamlined transition between bitmapped images and vector based illustrations available in Fireworks, something Illustrator is just becoming able to handle at the most minimal level and you have yourself an exceptional program that is now, in my opinion, being threatened by extinction.

And what about Linux? It wasn’t that far back that Macromedia made statements that it was planning to port its applications to Linux in the near future. Will Adobe allow this to continue? I can only hope at this point.