Microsoft offers early peek at designer tools

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Not much chance of success...

...if these products truly are "aimed at graphics designers and illustrators" as the article says. And here's why:

1. As a designer, I'm interested in SVG/Postscript, not XAML. No print shop in the world will deal with XAML files so already these products are no good for doing logos or corporate identity packages. Postscript rules the roost for print and like it or not, you MUST be able to translate your work to a printing press if you are to survive as a designer. Period. SVG, on the other hand, is an open specification, several of my favorite graphic apps use it already (so I can easily translate between Postscript/EPS/PDF and SVG) and the latest versions of Firefox and Opera render at least a decent subset of SVG 1.1:

http://isthis4real.com/orbit.xml

2. Microsoft had a good decade to win designers like myself (I own the company, so I get to make all software/hardware purchase decisions) and failed miserably. Publisher* and Word have always been the punchlines to a bad joke in the graphic arts/advertising world. Windows XP's Postscript drivers are so buggy, many consulting firms are recommending that folks trying to do high-end work on Windows move back to Win2K. Over the past decade, Microsoft released a slew of products aimed at folks like me, only to have Abode trounce them. Anybody here own one of those Microsof Postscript-clone printers they actually came out with at one point? Me neither. How about Microsoft Draw? PhotoDraw? Microsoft Reader? I thought so.

* Here's the most amusing example of MS's incompetence when it comes to graphic arts apps: a friend/client of mine ran out six months back and bought the latest version of Publisher to produce his product catalog. He cannot get Publisher to produce an EPS with the page elements oriented properly to the page setup, so that he can take his work over to the inevitably Mac-oriented print shop. This guy is no dummy--he has five software patents from a long career as a Windows-oriented programmer. And he still can't get Publisher to work right.

Posted by: Yen_z   Posted on: 01/24/06 You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

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