Creativepro.com reports “Adobe has officially announced that it won’t release new versions of FreeHand — not even maintenance updates.”
Heh. Good ol’ Freehand. Does anyone out there have any memories of this program they would like to share? Here are three of mine:
In college from 1993 to 1997 we were not taught Quark for layout. Instead we were taught to use Freehand for all our designs. Our design teacher was a Freehand expert. She even did some Freehand tutorials for the company or some publisher on CD-ROM.
For some reason I still have the Freehand 3.0 manual at home (see photo above). I guess it somehow traveled with me home from school. Now it’s just funny to see it on my shelf. I’d love to have a Photoshop 3.0 manual.
I work at Tribune Media Services who is in partnership with Knight Ridder Tribune (a competitor of AP). For years KRT made their graphics in Freehand. It wasn’t until last year that they finally switched over to Illustrator. It just goes to show how slow the newspaper industry works sometimes.
Any Freehand stories out there?
I didn’t learn Quark in school either. It was all about good ol’ Freehand! I remember starting at TMS back in 2000 and the folks at KRT grumbling about Freehand! I “helped” out more than once! The bittersweet story is that Freehand was replaced by Quark in most firms and agencies … the day I graduated. I was screwed; so, while I have a design degree, I’m not a graphic designer because I didn’t know Quark. I knew Freehand though and wore it like a badge of honor [just like my PageMaker badge!”> whenever I could whip it out at TMS.
I went to school with Matt (spudart). So we share many of the same FreeHand experiences. I remember we did ONE project in Quark XPress. It was a terrible disaster. We, the students, had no clue. Our teacher had no clue. Needless to say, we did only ONE project in Quark XPress. We went back to everyone’s comfort zone known as Aldus FreeHand.
along with your schools BODOXI fonts! ha! I’ve never used Freehand.
I graduated with my design degree in 1994 but I didn’t go to school with spud and moose … tragic, I know!
FreeHand originally came bundled with several hundred high-quality fonts, which I always appreciated. Macromedia also made a valiant effort to automate conversion of FreeHand documents to websites with an odd little companion program called InstaHTML, which never worked well for me. What I liked best about FreeHand is that it handled multiple pages. Adobe always had this arrogant delusion that by preventing Illustrator from doing multiples, you’d naturally buy InDesign. I can well remember the lengths to which some of us went to get Illustrator to spit out multipage documents. Like creating layers and printing the layers separately, or (my favorite) making the document something like 8.5×2000 and having the output tiled. Sheesh!