So, I finally got sick of not learning how to use Adobe Illustrator in my Graphic Communications classes, and I took it upon myself to figure out what the fuck is going on. In my opinion, Illustrator is a needlessly complicated pile of buggy code that has never, and
will never:
#1 - Operate efficiently, without stalling, crashing, freezing, pin-wheeling or otherwise taking more time to calculate/render things than it would take for me to cut the fucking rubylith freehand. This has nothing to do with your operating system, or hardware specs. It just sucks.
#2 - Operate in an intuitive manner. The concept of vector tracing (sure, the entirety of it) was revealed to me after about an hour of fucking with Macromedia Fireworks. Strokes, fills, overlapping, punching, cropping, layers, vector math, etc. I could turn a full colour 400x300px 72dpi web photo into a 3 color 4x3 foot stencil traced for 100dpi in maybe 90 minutes. Anytime I tried this in Illustrator, I would usually get frustrated to the point of deleting the software from my hard drive. Which brings me to...
#3 - Adobe Illustrator will never be worth the money they charge for it.
Anyway. I still need to learn how to use Illustrator if I want to get a job somewhere using Illustrator, right? And since they aren't actually teaching us how to do colour separations, or how colour separations work, or how to use Illustrator, or that Illustrator even exists... I realized it would be up to me to learn on my own time.
I found the "Pathfinder" tool, which is good. I didn't know it existed for the past 3 years or so. If a vector program doesn't have path-math, you're better off with an x-acto and an artboard.
And LiveTrace isn't horrible. I don't like it yet. I appreciated tracing vectors for stencils by hand, because it meant that when I was cutting it, I knew all the lines and angles already. But I guess if I'm using photo-emulsion for screens and printing I could cheat a little bit.
So I turned this:
Into a shirt design with two colorways. Trapped, registration marks and everything. Using Illustrator CS2. And I didn't even try to smash my computer.
And speaking of.. If anyone needs shirts printed, I have a studio set up in my living space now. I'm printing up to four color designs, using only water-based and PVC-free plastisol inks and printing only on union or USA made apparel. I also have a setup for graphic/poster printing, and can print posters up to 18x24 inches, or stickers.
I know I've had two people ask me about shirts orders in the past few months, and I didn't want to give them to the shop I work in. Because it sucks. But now I can print on my own, and I'm pretty confident about the quality.
http://www.providence-industrial.com/print.php