Programs Gone By
I’ve been doing some tidying up in my designated home studio space, sorting through dog eared C4 envelopes and battered archive boxes, in the process rediscovering the ‘fruits’ of 30 odd years of design work. Like most of our ilk, I’m somewhat of a pack-rat, I’ve hoarded just about every piece of design I’ve contributed anything to, no matter how embarrassing (and believe me, there’s been plenty of ‘the embarrassing’). With me it’s been a case of, if I put the effort into producing it, then there should be some evidence that it was produced. This attention to keeping every piece of work will no doubt prove to be an invaluable resource for scholars when the time comes for my inevitable retrospective exhibition and/or biography/monograph to be produced, but I digress.
Besides the often cringe-worthy assessment of the ghosts of design work past, I can’t help but reflect upon the tools that went into producing those pieces. I came of age as a designer in the first dawnings of the huge switch over from rubber cement and bromides to the early Apple Mac and associated design programs. My first introduction to the new medium came through a program called Ready Set Go! I can’t remember if the exclamation mark was included). It was basic, to say the least, even at the time I remember reading with envy about a program called Quark Xpress, a somehow mystical ‘do it all’ program for professional designers, not second year design students. Ready Set Go! and myself. We were both out of our depths at the time, but on reflection it seems as though it’s very limitations often led to some interesting runarounds in search of the perfect result. I’m sure it also stopped me from going overboard with the ‘freedom’ that today’s programs allow the professional and would-be designer. Ready Set Go! wasn’t going to let you fake anything.
It would be difficult for young designers to appreciate the revelation that came from using something like Ready Set Go! and then discovering Aldus Freehand. With Freehand, suddenly all things seemed possible and (more easily) achievable. Until you have spent hours using french curves and a technical or ruling pen(!) to draw up a logo and then another few hours at the bromide camera to get the right size, pasting it down with rubber cement on board, then taping a tracing cover-leaf with printer instructions scrawled on it, you appreciate the ‘magic’ of this drawing program. For me, never was a design program so perfectly named. Now you had a tool that gave you a ‘free-hand’ to design and draw shapes to your hearts content, easily and intuitively. In my mind it was (and still does) seem so much more of an expressive tool than the bogged down in the technical aspects of Adobe Illustrator even today. There has not been an update to Freehand since 2005 when Adobe acquired Macromedia, but a quick search around the internet will uncover a plethora of well known designers who still lament its passing.
Even though it has been years since I last used it, the ‘ghost’ lingers on in my disdain of Illustrator, a program I will go to some lengths to avoid using if possible – a program that seems to sneer at me and say, “so you want to be all intuitive and creative do you? Not on my watch! Let me show you how many drop menus you need to go through to get to that, and don’t even think about trying to paste something inside an object!” Maybe I just need to bite the bullet and get over it.
I’m sure I still have a copy of Freehand on some dusty CD somewhere (remember storing work on CDs!), sharing kilobytes with my copy of Wolfenstein and Disk Doubler. If I came across it, I don’t think I’d have the heart to throw it out. Like my early amateur design work, it doesn’t serve much purpose anymore, other than to remind myself of where I have been to get to here I guess, but isn’t that the point of any treasured memento? Just don’t get me started on that topic, unless you want to hear about my first Apple LC (colour!) with 4meg of RAM and a 40mb hard drive that I would never ever fill up!