Weighing in on Popular Debates–Freehand vs Illustrator or InDesign

Let me be perfectly blunt about this: I do my page layout in InDesign. I’ve used Freehand before–though it’s been a few years now and I have Illustrator on both my systems and resort to it more and more frequently. Based on what the programs were designed and marketed to be, Freehand and Illustrator are supposed to be direct competitors in the vector illustration market. However, it turns out that many Freehand users are actually doing page layout and enjoying the experience.

I bring this up after watching my brother work for a few short minutes yesterday. While I’m something of a “Johnny come lately” to the design field–having picked up my design skills on the job and my application proficiency through use under deadline–my brother is not only a well-trained and talented designer, but he’s been succeeding as a freelancer in a very competitive field for many years–and he has always been very vocal against any Adobe product. He used Quark Express until his collegues forced him to switch to InDesign, and yet he still uses Freehand for almost everything he can. I watched him using Freehand yesterday and while I didn’t bring it up at the time, I secretly mourned for him. After all, we all know that Adobe bought out Macromedia to get access to Flash and now Freehand–as a direct competitor to their own software–will die a slow and agonizing death.

But is the alternative for Freehand users really Illustrator? If you visit the Adobe user forums, most of the users there think Freehand died a long time ago. In their minds Illustrator is a far superior product and always has been. But of course they think that. Illustrator is a fine vector illustration software. With its latest and greatest toys (oops, tools) such as auto trace and auto fill, it makes an artist’s job that much easier, but is it the real competitor to Freehand? After watching my brother work, I’d have to say no. The real competitor is InDesign. While artists use Freehand, I strongly suspect that it is a whole cross section of page designers that will be annoyed by the loss of Freehand–and Illustrator offers nothing close to a substitute, and unfortunately InDesign doesn’t really help much either.

Oh sure, InDesign is great for handling text–it has the tools for that in spades–and is better at it than anything else on the market–but where InDesign cannot even begin to approach Freehand is in page management. Try working with pages of multiple shapes and sizes touching or not touching on any given side or any given orientation in InDesign, and you will quickly discover that it just isn’t possible. An InDesign document can only contain one page size and orientation and the pages can only be spread horizontally. I’ve heard the arguments against any other workflow on the forums, but I frankly think such arguments are purely frantic justification for the lack of a very valuable feature. Now I personally wouldn’t do page layout in Freehand–but that’s only because I do not know the application that well, and I’m much more proficient in InDesign–despite some of its glaring faults. But I’m not so much a blindly loyal Adobe fan to claim that Freehand is not superior in someways to anything that Adobe has to offer. I certainly hope that some of Freehand’s unique features will eventually find their way into InDesign and Illustrator as time progresses, however, until then, we will just have to mourn for our fellow designers who have to watch their beloved Freehand fade into oblivion. Their efficiency will mostly likely be mangled by the Adobe way of doing things.

Shall we observe a moment of silence of here?

—–