#designerproblems

There are few sins graver (for a graphic designer anyway) than publicly admitting you hate a certain program. I’m often chastised (though generally playfully) for my open and unabashed dislike/hatred of Adobe Illustrator. I understand the necessity for the program but honestly I’m just not a fan. There’s a lot of things that are just a thousand times easier to do in InDesign than they’ve ever been in Illustrator.

A big issue I’ve noticed with Illustrator is consistency. A trick that I can do once in Illustrator I find doesn’t always work a different time around. Somehow changing the color of a outlined piece of text suddenly changes the way in which a clipping mask works.

Then there’s kerning and leading, two very important typographic elements which are surprisingly exhausting in Illustrator, particularly because you have to search for them if your character panel isn’t already up, but worse still apparently at a certain point no matter how much you try to fine tune the kerning Illustrator will simply ignore you.

I’ve been told that if I work more in Illustrator it will become easier, (sort of like how I hated InDesign when I first learned it). But the thing of it is, a lot of what I can do in Illustrator I can also do and do more efficiently in InDesign. I work better with text than graphics anyway… and worst case scenario I can drop things into Illustrator after I’ve designed them first in InDesign is that a little more timely? Probably no more so than starting in Illustrator and moving over to InDesign, and in my case probably less time as Illustrator often makes me want to throw my computer out of the nearest window.

I’m sure in the design world I’m mostly alone here, and I’m also sure that for non-designers a lot of this post will read as ranty nonsensical babble, but let’s put it this way, for anyone who uses Scrivener, imagine having to go back to Microsoft Word or some other word processor that was not specifically invented for writers. It’s exhausting and while it might be able to do most of the same things, finding the right button to do it is next to impossible and in the end the effort seems hardly worth it. It’s easier to just write it in Scrivener then export to Word (if necessary).