Freehand VS Illustrator VS Godzilla

FREEHAND OR ILLUSTRATOR?

3 months now of working in Freehand (R.I.P. 2003), and learning why there is a divide and theorizing why some like Freehand and some like Illustrator.

Well, wait, nobody really LIKES Illustrator do they? It's a mess to work in, and has the worst object selection and bezier tool implementation I have ever seen. But give me Illustrator over Freehand, because if my final printed result bears little relationship to the file I created, I am unhappy, as is my client. And that is what I constantly see working in Freehand.

Reading forums seeking the answer, it seemed clear who likes Freehand: designers who value the ability to design intuitively over the need to design something that will print. Does that sound mean? It isn't meant to be. I am in a rare position in that my career straddles both; 15 years of pre press work taught me what can be printed and what cannot. 15 years of design underscored what I already knew: it doesn't matter how good your design looks onscreen and in an rgb jpg; if it prints looking like crap, you have an unhappy client.

There was a clear thread of "my printer says the freehand files are hard to work with, they are just lazy" in many comments. And that is what I hear day after day in my current, Freehand-hobbled job.

Freehand was the FIRST desktop publishing program I used, and I can concur that it is easier to draw and be fluid in Freehand; the tools and menus once upon a time were more intuitive. I was converted to an Illustrator user by the best operator I have ever known, after seeing the light: Illustrator, like Quark in its day, actually helps you produce results that can be printed. And while there will never be WYSIWYG, Illustrator is about 100x better than Freehand at showing you what you are doing.

Freehand SEEMS to handle color onscreen poorly. I had to research and found that I am right. The book Real World Color Management reflects my experiences perfectly; exporting anything but an eps from Freehand will result in spastic, insane color shifts. Freehand works all it's raster effects in RGB creating color shifts and breaks when a raster effect is applied over a vector element. Even when you set the raster effects to CMYK. Yes, the experts know this too:

http://www.peachpit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=31346

So, that's where I am at. Working in Freehand, it is absolutely impossible to work with confidence in color. And when I am additionally crippled by lousy non postscript printers and clients who want to look at the screen at a 90º angle and their crappy print by 60 watt tungsten bulb, there is no hope of ever pleasing the client.

So, if you are your own boss and your own approval, Freehand will be fine. If your end product is a picture that looks good on a website, you may do ok. If however you need to get a file to press looking like the images the client approved - you are screwed.