Professor David Brailsford takes you on a walk down memory lane with Apple’s introduction of the Laserwriter.
The Computerphile videos are a bit low tech and homespun, but I find them both charming and informative. [Via MacTrast]
The birth of desktop publishing
Lots of fond and not-so-fond memories of that DTP era. I was there with both Apple and Adobe.
Learning PostScript was never on the table for me; writing algorithms to describe math was the domain of better and more patient minds than mine, as I’d learned the hard way in college computer science classes.
But Illustrator was similarly the spur for me to bite the DTP bullet. The articles and demos of the program made such terrific sense as a way to draw vector art, I bought a copy of Illustrator in July of 1988 months before I chose a Mac to run it on. Both receipts are up on my wall.
So we do have something in common! Illustrator was my first pro software purchase, in April of 1987. $500, as I recall.
I kinda think the infamous pen tool remains a mystery to far too many to this day! What helped me immensely was to get a grasp of just was a Bezier curve, and then to see its components as Illustrator anchor and direction points in that first book.
Indeed. It was the way Bezier curves worked (first, as written up in the magazines, then as demo’d at trade shows) that sold me. And the rest of the interface followed suit; everything combined into smart tools that allowed me to avoid doing math!
My receipt for the software says $299.99. I paid cash. I then realized I needed to get on the stick and choose a Mac, which turned out to be the SE FDHD and an ImageWriter II.
Very interesting.
You know, I had a conversation with a veteran Adobe employee about a decade ago who told me the story that John Warnock initially created Illustrator for his wife so that she could design some curtains!
That’s pretty hilarious. I hope it’s true.
You know what I find curious these days? There are any number of Photoshop substitutes for people doing Web and app work who don’t need the entire Photoshop toolkit. Two or three of those apps look amazingly good and wonderfully functional.
So where are the amazingly good Illustrator substitutes?
Good point! I tried Freehand for awhile, but found its pen tool and other functions to be awkward compared to Illustrator’s.
I don’t begrudge Adobe its due after all these years. On the contrary, I think they’ve weathered the various storms and shifting tides of the industry well, all things considered.
Though Illustrator, Photoshop, and inDesign each now have so many features I may never use, I give them credit for responding to what must be so many requests for them.
I really like the new Illustrator round corners functionality, for example. Wow. Such a sweet interface for something we used to have to do by hand for so many years.
I also cast my vote in favor of the new Creative Cloud initiative. I don’t consider $50/mo exorbitant for access to virtually all of its software tools as well as more timely updates and upgrades.
I’ll disagree with you on the latter, for several reasons, but that’s a whole different conversation about corporate software buying and its effects upon freelancers.
I don’t have any sympathy for freelancers. I’ve been one full-time for the better part of three decades, and we’re doing better than ever with Adobe tools. Can’t imagine how we’d be in this business without Adobe or Apple.
Though I’ve been a lone wolf for the most part and rarely cross paths with other freelancers, I can say that, almost without exception, that whenever a new customers wants us to fix or utilize work done by someone else, that that work is usually UN-usuable, usually for its inept execution or structure which showed us that the person didn’t know what they were doing; or that it was simply butt ugly, showing us that the person just didn’t have what it takes.
Though it may seem somewhat glamorous to some just starting out, there’s no getting around the fact that it takes a lot of work in just learning the tools, and then work in figuring out solutions to the customer’s problems, and then being able to execute in a reasonable amount of time for the quoted price.
It’s tough, and you typically spend many unpaid hours, either in learning, or in just “getting it right.” If you get it right for a decent rate, you stand a chance of surviving until the next job comes from a pleased customer or from another calls you based on a recommendation.
If you can take responsibility for all of that and still love the hell out of the work, then you’ll make it, as well as get paid decently enough to make the cost of the tools a rather minor consideration.
I’ve freelanced, on and off, for about twenty years, mostly supplementing production- or design-related full-time jobs, until four years ago when I went totally freelance. I’ve likewise had lots of opportunities to fix other people’s work—produced by freelancers and staff alike—and I’ve found that incompetence is hardly exclusive to either group.
Yes, it takes a lot of work to learn one’s craft. And the realities of practicing that craft—whether at a day job or on one’s own—have traditionally involved using software that might not need to be updated at every revision, but is still perfectly adequate for the task, provided its developers are still supporting it. Companies and individuals have traditionally decided for themselves when they felt an update was worth buying, and could make an informed business decision on whether to expend resources. That option is being taken away, and it stinks.
Whether one’s business is doing well or not, whether one is grateful to Adobe for the past 25 years or not, whether one has “sympathy” for freelancers or not… none of these have anything to do with how I feel about Adobe’s new subscription business model.
Creative Cloud is still a treadmill that Adobe is requiring new users to jump upon—and stay upon—if they want access to archived work created with it. Some of the new features are nice, but they’re not worth mandated purchasing on Adobe’s schedule.
I’m happy you’re doing well with the new tools. I’ll be using CS5.5 and CS6 as long as my clients do.
I’m glad we’re having this conversation after our previous skirmishes on other comment threads.
I can understand that you’re constrained to being compatible with clients’ setups, but I’m in the enviable position of dealing mainly with new customers who are often first-time or independent authors who need our services and don’t have any entrenched software setups.
I can understand Adobe’s strategy of a subscription business model. I think it’s far better than what preceded it for the already stated reasons. You apparently are in a transition phase in which there are few or no compelling reasons for you or your clients to change over. But there will come a day when new hardware and/or OS systems will become reasons themselves for upgrading.
I’d say flexibility is also a desirable strategy if one wants to stay viable in this industry.
Anyway, I wish you good production.
Likewise; it’s better to disagree without rancor.
In a way, having done advertising, publishing, and educational services, you could say I’ve always been in a transition phase of some kind. My last day job went from QuarkXpress 4.11/OS9 to Adobe CS2/OS X, then to CS4. That company’s freelancers of course had to keep up. But it was all based on established publishing workflows that had taken time to create and stabilize, and wouldn’t benefit from frequent disruption.
My current design work still relies upon core clients like that, and upon what their managements choose to standardize upon. My concerns about flexibility are more about getting better at Web design, which is a variety of work that, interestingly, won’t necessarily require Adobe’s latest offerings for me to keep up.
I started my DTP career in 1986 with a shared laserwriter and mac SE
Those were the days, huh? Mind describing where you were and who were your clients?
True enough, however, you might want to give Muse a look-see (oops, that’d require a CC subscription, but then that’sd be a good reason for you to upgrade). It’s getting a lot of attention from Adobe. And there’s Edge Animate with its Javascript and CSS3 underpinnings.
I was working for a hospital system doing slides with letterset type and then photographing with litho film and hand tinting. Also, we did many single sheet documents for use in and around the hospital.
I had very fond memories of the early days as well. I worked for a company that introduced the first full bitmap memory controller for a laser printer. It was the QMS Lasergrafix 1200. In 1984 their were negotiations with Adobe to port PostScipt to this controller. Against John Warnock’s advice an agreement was made to put port it. I showed that controller running PostScript at Comdex as a technology before the Apple LaserWriter was announced. I actually attend the very first PostScript training class along with two fellow employees. I wasn’t told until years later that at the time there was no formal training. I was put together on the fly by John D.