Programmes which handle vector graphics - a deeper look

Illustrator - FreeHand - Corel Draw - Canvas

By now I'm forced to a remarkable conclusion: using Illustrator is a completely different experience from using FreeHand, CorelDraw or Canvas ...

One thing is that Illustrator feels like a Mac program, while FreeHand feels like a Windows program which has been rather poorly adapted to the Mac; CorelDraw feels like a Windows program which hasn't been adapted to the Mac at all, and Canvas feels simply too much of everything, as if you'll never find your way around ...

I want to allow for the possibility that I'm being unfair to FreeHand, that it must be a setting I haven't discovered ... and I must recognise that I'm comparing Illustrator 9 with Freehand 8.

But the bottom line is still that Illustrator is completely seductive and I can't wait to get the program open again every morning and spend all day producing those delightful curves ... FreeHand was never like that.

After a while I realised it's something very akin to love, the way it accepts whatever clumsy offering I have to come with, and immediately creates something soft and elegant out of it ...

And you may have noticed that during this process of exploring how things work, the original question of auto-tracing from an existing picture, or even doing it manually, has become quite uninteresting - I'm now totally absorbed by Illustrator simply as a concept and a life-experience ...