On Adobe Part 3: best case

In this, the final post on the Adobe-overdose kick I’ve been on this week, I’ll discuss what I think the ultimate “CS” solution would look like from my perspective. Enough intro, lets get it on!

Photoshop is for photos.
Illustrator is for Illustrating.

Seems like a simple idea, but the current situation is so far from this as to be laughable. Photoshop is a swiss-army knife for all-things-graphics, and Illustrator is very specialized, designed less for illustration than for graphic logos and type. I’d like to see a Photoshop that is less focused on being everything to everyone, and more focused on it’s namesake. I’d like to see an Illustrator that is a truly robust stand-alone illustration solution that works similarly to Photoshop, but takes full advantage of the power of vector.

That said, I’m not a Photographer, I’m a designer. The majority of my time in CS is spent illustrating ideas. Hence this post will focus solely on Illustrator.

Illustration Utopia

Imagine this: you open a fresh document. You drag out a circle, and then change it’s radius in the appearance palette so that it’s exactly 3″. You remember that it actually needs to be 2.25″, so you change the value and the circle updates.

You draw a line intersecting the circle, and click “trim” to create a semi-circle at the line. You move the line and the circle updates. You grab your fillet tool and create .1″ radii at the corners. The fillets are too big, so you go back to the appearance palette and change them to .05″. Everything updates.

You apply a plastic “material” to the object. It gets a flat texture applied to it, and the appearance palette is now populated with properties relevant to the plastic material. You adjust the color of the plastic. It looks flat.

You grab your “vector airbrush” tool, and with the object selected, you paint directly on the “surface” of the object. Instead of painting a “color”, however, you choose to paint with “highlight,” a property defined in the material. It has a special color and anistropic fall-off specific to plastic. Of course the texture is retained. Now you paint with “shadow.” Color is automatically selected by the material, so changing the material properties will change the shadows accordingly. Highlights and shadows will obviously only appear within the alpha of the parent object, but double-clicking the object (like any other group) will allow you to select the highlight/shadow paths like any other brush stroke for adjustment.

Now you have a very nicely modeled 3D-looking plastic semi-sphere. You adjust the plastic color, and the highlight/shadows update in color to match. But you decide you want to see what it looks like in wood. So you apply a wood material. Your light and shadow adjusts in color, as does the texture and color. The wood looks good, but you want to see it a little bit richer. So you add a little red to the color of the wood.

Oops, the engineer called and we can’t manufacture a 2.25″ semi-sphere. Better change it to 2.3″. Done.

Now I want to sketch a new product idea. I open a new document, and grab the “brush” tool. It acts just like the pencil tool in Sketchbook Pro, except that I can grab (and alter) my individual vector lines! Opacity, size, and brush softness all both controlled by pen pressure for a very realistic feel.

I grab a new paint tool: the “paint” tool. I color in a large area with pen-like motions, but this time, instead of creating a zig-zag mess of lines, it’s actually created a shape defined by an outline!

I select the new blob I just created and apply a canvas material to it. I blur it. The blur is on top in the appearance palette, so it affects both the geometry and the material. I drag it below the material in the palette, so that the blur only affects the shape, and the material is applied on top of the blurred shape.

I grab my airbrush tool and paint in highlights and shadows, all with the alpha of the parent object.

Now I make a new layer and start using the drafting tools to tighten-up my sketch and apply real materials.

Finally, I export my final art as an IGS or STP file for direct-import into my 3D CAD package. I’m in heaven.

The Features

The AI layering system should be redesigned from the ground-up. It should be more like Photoshop, for the sake of convention and ease of use. Masking should be much simpler and more intuitive, probably more like Photoshop. Adjustment layers should be incorporated, and objects should make greater use of the appearance palette. The appearance palette should contain every attribute of an object, and each should be editable. It should accommodate multiple, layered fills, gradients, textures, and effects. Sets of appearance attributes should be save-able just like character styles in type (this functionality exists to an extent, but is weak and under-played).

My ideal AI would have a full and robust set of CAD tools for drawing. Industrial designers aren’t the only people who would benefit from the ability to create dimensionally-accurate art! Logos, labels, pad-prints, and many other graphic projects are dimensionally critical, and would be much better off with a strong set of parametric tools. Some of my favorites are listed in the previous post. Anything is better than nothing! At the top of the list would be a good offset tool (the current menu-driven one is weak), a more robust set of spline tools (CV curves, thru point curves, and curvature-continuous blend curves), a strong visual fillet tool, curvature porcupine analysis, more robust trim and join tools, and a truly radial set of arc tools.
With a strong set of CAD tools, curvature analysis tools (to help you know when pixels lie), and a more robust appearance palette, we’d be well on our way. With the stronger appearance palette would come something that I think would be useful: “materials.” I’d like to be able to define different default “material” swatches to emulate surface-types like paper, plastic, wood, etc.

Painting tools would work more like raster tools. If I could get all of the simplicity and intuitiveness of raster with the added updatability and resolution-independence of vector, I’d be one happy kid. I think it’s possible, and it’s possible with today’s technology.

For example, I’d like to be able to create groups and clipping-masks intuitively on-the-fly. I’d like to be able to select an object with a wood material applied to it, grab my vector-airbrush tool, and start painting highlight and shadow directly onto the object with an automatic clipping mask linked to the alpha of the parent object. This way I could create a sphere by drawing a circle, and simply airbrushing some highlight and shadow right onto it… without the need for extra in-between steps! This in itself would be an enormous productivity gain.

Better painting tools would be great. Like the “paint” tool I mentioned above that creates “shapes” rather than “strokes.” It’s the equivalent of sketching a filled-area with a brush, expanding the stroke, and using the pathfinder to boolean it all together into one big blob. An airbrush tool would be basically the same as this, only blurred. Ideally this could be done in real-time. If processor won’t allow, it can be “faked” with a Sketchbook Pro style raster representation until it is replaced by its vector counterpart. This way it’s real-time, sort-of :)

No tools would be purely menu-driven. All menu-driven tools would be available as icons that could be placed in custom toolboxes. I know it’s good to have consistency in products to avoid confusing people, but some simple custom toolboxes would never hurt. Drag-and-drop simplicity, please!