Illustrator CS6 still not ready for prime time.

I've been using all of the Adobe products since they came out (or before they were owned by Adobe), allowing me to be one of the fortunate few who has the ability to notice the changes with every new release. Some of the newer releases have created a few changes that actually aren't for the better at all. Since the future of everything related to marketing communications will ultimately involve some sort of digital medium I was shocked at some of the major oversight on Adobe's part in regard to the treatment of pixels in one of their popular illustration programs, Adobe Illustrator. Furthermore the Save for Web feature in Adobe Illustrator no longer has the option to save HTML files for you. It kind of makes me wonder who's driving the agendas at Adobe. If they're willing to sacrifice a few things to save their productivity but tank the productivity of the end users is it really worth supporting Adobe anymore at all? I would say no. Now is the time competition... step up!

Since I'm a long-time user of Adobe Illustrator I almost always use it to generate layouts for the web for websites, email marketing pieces, and sometimes for animations for the web. I was a little shocked when one of my agency clients sent me a file for an email marketing piece (we call them mail blasts) and I was unable to save the file for web with HTML after painstakingly creating all of the necessary slices. This is a huge setback. Not only did I have to save back to an older version of CS5 that I luckily still had installed, but I also had to make sure that my client didn't use any of the newer features in Illustrator like gradients as strokes that could crash the older version of the program. Luckily this time everything went okay.

The deeper I got into Illustrator trying to Save for the Web I noticed a few other issues that actually showed up in CS5. The pixel placement of the elements in the interface plays a huge part in how those pieces will render when they're saved for the internet. Since Illustrator is a Vector program, all of the lines, points, fills, and shading that your use in the document might be assigned a width in the program, but because they're all relative to the pasteboard might not line up with pixels on-screen. So one of the things I noticed is if you have your artwork start at some odd placement like 102.45 pixels, that .45 pixels actually gets split and you'll end up with either a transparent or slightly discolored pixel depending on the save type. This existed in CS5.

Older versions of the applications are much more robust with dealing with the internet files (web formats) in general. They have the ability to position items exactly and when saved out do not have issues with pixels and borders not lining up.

The newest version of Illustrator (at the time of this writing) CS6 has some other issues that it has been plagued with. One being the measurement system overall. If you play with the strokes and watch the positioning of the boxes you'll see what I mean. The strokes actually take size, similar to what you experience when working with strokes on the web. This means that rather than being just a stroke applied to the size of the box, it's actually altering the shape characteristics of the box itself.

A little test:

New Document Dialogue in Adobe Illustrator

Create a 120px x 120px new document. This creates an art board at 0,0. Be sure to turn on your ruler and set the ruler units to pixels. (Note: When you change the size on the New Document dialog box it will no longer say Web or Print because the size isn't stored as a profile.)

Draw a box inside with a 1-point/pixel black stroke that is 120 pixels wide by 120 pixels tall.

Note in the control palette that the width is 120px by 120px, but the x coordinate for the box isn't at 0,0 like intended or in old versions. It's actually at -.5px x -.5px meaning it's splitting the centered stroke (default for Illustrator) in half.

Example from the control palette.

Stroke Palette

Screenshot of final file.

If I select "align stroke to inside" in my stroke palette (left), now the box is off-centered visually in the interface. When the image of the box is exported with the save for web feature the box saved is offset just like the preview (right). This problem happens in the 32-bit and 64-bit versions of Adobe Illustrator for Windows. I've not tested these findings on a Mac but they are more than likely similar.

This brings up the issue though, if the future of everything we're doing from Web to Email to Mobile Devices to Television (movies as well) are all related to the pixel and Adobe didn't think this was a major issue getting this building block of everything under control, then what are we to do? A few of my clients have noticed this issue asked me what to do. They do not have access to the older versions of the software that I have. Furthermore with the nanny-state tactics that Adobe has been doing of late, there may be the possibility at some point in time that I can not use my older software (rightfully licensed) because of some other glitch in their system.

I've been becoming increasingly more and more frustrated with Adobe being on the bleeding edge myself and see no good alternative on the horizon.  Since Adobe was allowed to purchase Macromedia, they've effectively created a monopoly on the industry.

Recently I was apprised of the information that although I paid for the Master Collection of the Adobe Creative Suite, I'm not allowed to have the most recent upgrades to the software because I'm not a member of their costly abomination to the modern licensing world, the Creative Cloud Subscription. I refused to be beheld to a company that can raise the price of the software that I'm using for a living while I'm using it simply so they can make a few extra bucks for their shareholders. Anyone considering the Creative Cloud, at the time of this writing even with the discount for already being an Adobe user, I can tell you that it is way more cost effective to only pay for the software outright and then upgrade when you need to, rather than paying for the cloud services. The drawback is that you do not receive the bleeding edge buggy features (which by my latest experiences) that might render your copy of the program you use for work useless.

Until later, -Chris