Today I came around an interesting site: Free FreeHand. That brought back up memories…

The first contact I had with digital design was seeing my cousin do her magic with a Mac and FreeHand 7, trying to reproduce what she sketched with her markers. A few years later, I found that I was very much drawn towards design and decide to get myself a pretty iMac Special Edition (one of those gray bubbles that just had a CD reader, I remember using a pretty big IoMega CD burner), got Photoshop and FreeHand so I could start working out my design skills before attempting to actually do some work around it. Fast forward 4-5 years and CS comes out, I get a chance to upgrade and start self teaching Illustrator and InDesign. In 2006, Adobe announces the halt of FreeHand development, and most designers are forced to use Illustrator.

Learning to do all I did in Freehand in two apps: Illustrator and InDesign was hard. After a while, I start getting a grip of how things should really work. I used Freehand for everything: logo design, document layouts- I even knew designers that did their quote proposals and kept track of their invoicing within FreeHand. Now I was forced to split my work flow into two applications and it felt like walking blindfolded into unknown territory. After a few months, I get this huge project about making a series of restaurant designs and I see that as a huge opportunity to get my groove going into the Creative Suite.

I’m one of those self taught designers, and being as curious with software and adventurous enough to try this software in a country where FreeHand and sometimes CorelDraw ruled the vector design work, I embraced the opportunity. By that time, I was in CS2. First bump in the road: The printer didn’t have Illustrator at all, not to mention InDesign. I did some research and started convincing that we either could work out with EPS files for the pages and he could put them together in whatever application he fancied or we could work with PDFs. His answer: TIFF files please. For a 20 page 8.5″ x 13″ menu… I was scared. How many Cd’s would that be? He wanted all the TIFFS (and the EPS files as a safe cushion) in Cd’s… the printer didn’t have a DVD reader. Second bump. I had to send this huge amount of Cd’s but the menu got printed, looked great. Job done. Not only here in Guatemala but in El Salvador too. CS3 comes out, then CS4. Until now I can go with complete confidence to a printer here and I know they will have the InDy+Illy knowledge and accept the files in PDF for printing. Still, you can hear a designer walk into a print shop asking about FreeHand.

The Free FreeHand site wants to rescue FreeHand from the doom it’s already in. Having used FreeHand throughout it’s latter versions, I have to say that it was a solid competitor to Illustrator CS2, and now in CS4 there are many of FreeHand’s features put into Illustrator. The site has date of September 2009, and looking at the date, 10 days into September and they already have 1421 subscribers to their newsletter and are encouraging their supporters to spread the word. I know that if FreeHand resurrects from the dead, I wouldn’t migrate back. I already worked out the old designs I had in FreeHand and upgraded them to Illustrator, when it wasn’t as forward and easy as it is now. But the most important reason for me not to move back to FreeHand it would be it’s lack of Creative Suite integration.

It’s going to be interesting where this goes. If they get Adobe to either release the code or release the FreeHand rights to development to a new company, it would be a surprise.