an open letter to John Warnock

Yeah, I haven’t been totally hip on a version of Adobe Illustrator since version 9. Sure, symbols are cool — I mean Flash and Freehand were already utilizing ‘em — but I didn’t like all of the web functionality and plus, it ran so-o-o slowly.

In addition, there was always the issue of typography, not the typography engine (ugh!), the fonts themselves. When I was in school, I was lucky enough to work in student publications, where we had the Adobe Font Folio. But it wasn’t until I went out into the cruel world that I realized how indispensable was that resource. And I often wondered how Adobe could have this incredible cache of fonts and never distribute them with their products.

And so, I felt like former Adobe employee Andrei Herasimchuk took the words out of my mouth when I read his open letter to John Warnock (link).

I can only hope that the merger of Adobe and Macromedia will result in a Creative Suite 3 that takes the best from both product lines. In May, Adobe announced that Freehand and GoLive would no longer be developed. But I know that only time will tell, only time will tell.