There is—mildly putting it—additional news regarding yesterday’s announcement of a pending move. However, the details are now in a great deal of flux and without enough concrete facts to prevent several week’s worth of “Remember what I said? That’s changed again” posts, I’ll suffice it to say that the move is in a holding pattern, which does not affect the desire to simplify in the least (so continue to let me know if you’re interested in anything), but when I know more I’ll fill in the rest of the details here.
Instead of all that what I’d like to talk about for a moment is the Adobe/Macromedia merger.
By trade I am a web developer. By training I am a graphic designer. In the course of a given week I probably use at least six Adobe and/or Macromedia products at one time or another and I have experience with dozens of them. Photoshop, Illustrator, Fireworks, Flash, Dreamweaver, Acrobat and ImageReady are my bread and butter; I’ve also played with AfterEffects, InDesign, Freehand, Contribute, HomeSite, GoLive, PageMaker, FrameMaker, PageMill, Director and Streamline. I’m familiar with these companies; I’ve even applied to work at both of them at least two times apiece, probably more. This merger actually matters to me.
I can’t be sure how this is going to pan out. I doubt if Adobromedia know yet. But here’s what I hope will happen. I hope they’ll leave Fireworks alone. Fireworks is a funky little application because it’s sorta kinda Macromedia’s answer to Photoshop, except that it isn’t. In the world of digital graphic design there are programs which deal with vector art and those that deal with bitmap art. Vector art is plotted points which use complex mathematical formulas to render an image. A blue box in vector art is four corner points with their relative positions, a line value (thickness, color) and a fill color (blue). Bitmap art is a bunch of dots (pixels) each with a specific color which when combined create an image. If you’ve ever seen those things where they have all the people in a football stadium hold up a colored card and when viewed from above or across the field you’ve seen bitmap theory in action.
Because vector art deals with points and lines and bitmap art deals with tiny dots, there are usually two different programs to handle each kind of art. Generally if you hear someone referring to something as relating to Illustrator, they mean vector art. Something that relates to Photoshop is bitmapped. I’ll spare you the lecture about the relative strengths and weaknesses of each type, but suffice to say that vector art is generally somewhat cartoony due to precise outlining and typically solid colors but smaller in file size; it’s usually used for visual design like logos and banners. Bitmap art is great for photos since it can easily approximate the subtle shift in color from realistic images, but each pixel takes up a specific amount of space so images with lots of pixels take up a lot of room (or disk space as the case may be).
Fireworks is freaky because it’s kind of a hybrid of vector and bitmap art. The reasoning for this is only obvious when you consider what it was designed to do which is create and manage web art. Fireworks and Photoshop don’t really compete because Fireworks is never going to match Photoshop’s ability to manage digital photography. Photoshop is, in essence, a digital darkroom. But Photoshop is also not so great at dealing with the specific needs of web-based art; it simply wasn’t designed for that. As a concession to the throngs of designers using Photoshop for their web pages, Adobe started bundling ImageReady with Photoshop, but it feels exactly like what it is: A slapped-on concession to web designers.
Fireworks on the other hand was designed without much passing interest in manipulating digital photos the way Photoshop does. Instead you draw with vector points and Fireworks creates bitmap lines. Shapes and fill colors are simple to apply, shift and adjust because many times people designing websites are doing so in a similar manner to the way they would design a logo or banner; Illustrator is used extensively in marketing materials—check out a cereal box sometime for an example of something designed with Illustrator—and many websites are designed with this same mindset. But websites don’t natively display vector art so the end result needs to be bitmap. This is the brilliance of Fireworks.
Perhaps not surprisingly I got to know Fireworks really well. The ease of creating simple images (which is about the extent of my skill) is reminiscent of Illustrator which I find far more forgiving to someone of my meager artistic talent while the end result is instantly usable in my actual work which I find convenient, far more so than exporting an Illustrator file to Photoshop/ImageReady to optimize for web use. Fireworks, coincidentally, also makes a superb page layout mockup tool and has some nice features for automating the creation of imagemaps and you can even export slices of a larger image for template building with some HTML already generated.
I’d like to think that with a bit of Adobe’s help and some nice suite-integration, Fireworks CS 2006 could be a great middleman between Photoshop and Illustrator. It has a much better optimizing interface than ImageReady so it could replace that “program” and with a bit better support for native Illustrator files, it could be a great engine for creating web-friendly images from Illustrator designs which I’m sure would make the typesetter/web designer’s life much easier.
Of course what will probably happen is either ImageReady will get a few of the cheesier features from Fireworks and call it an upgrade or possibly they’ll try (and fail) to tack on some of Firework’s functionality to Photoshop and end up ruining it all. Optimism is for suckers. Meh.
As far as the other apps are concerned, I predict that Freehand will go the way of the dodo; Flash will stick around and probably (as someone else suggested) spell the end for Adobe’s SVGA viewer which basically sounds the death toll for that format; Dreamweaver will replace GoLive or whatever Adobe is calling their historically pathetic HTML suite and I suspect that if it hasn’t already Director will continue its slow fade into obscurity as regular programming languages become more viable than the application-specific Lingo and web-based presentations/interactive programs become more practical than standalone ones.
I want to be hopeful about this merge, but I worry because Adobe has always seemed to have its heart more in the traditional print design camp while Macromedia has been more web-friendly. It would be nice if the merger would strike a pleasant balance between the two, but I think that Fireworks’ fate may be the bellwether that determines which side has won or if that unlikely balance has actually been achieved.
