Weapons of Choice?
by mark
posted on June 8th, 2008
posted on June 8th, 2008
In an effort to better support the artists in the community, we'd like to understand what kinds of tools you use for creating and viewing your designs. I know from experience that we have quite a few Safari and Firefox viewers, and more than a handful of IE users. What versions are in use and what platforms? Mac? XP? Linux?
What about development tools? Adobe Photoshop? Illustrator? Flash? GIMP? MS Paint (ha!)? What versions?
How do you actually create your designs? What level of quality or compression if any do you use in your final creation?
on June 9th, 2008
I use Firfox v. 2.0.0.14 on Macs running Leopard 10.5.2. All of my designs start on 11 x 14 paper. I scan in a 300 dpi 100% and work from there in CS3 Photoshop to generate the final art. If it then needs to be vector I export and convert in CS3 Illustrator maintianing 100% size and 300 pdi. All preview art for submissions are 60% quality jpegs out of photoshop. I rarely touch Safari and of course IE is out of the picture on Macs now. EDIT: Now running Leopard 10.5.3
on June 8th, 2008
I have a Mac Book Pro with Tiger still (no Leopard yet *tear*). I used to use Safari a lot, but I had some problems so I usually use Firefox now. I start by drawing my designs on 8.5''x11'' paper and inking them w/ micron pens. Then I scan them in at 300 DPI and edit the lineart a bit if I need to in Photoshop CS2. Then I export it over to Illustrator CS2 and finish it up there. At the end I'll usually move it back over to Photoshop and make a JPG for posting purposes.
on June 8th, 2008
I use Firefox 2, with loads of extensions, on Windows XP. As for artsy stuff, I generally start with a sketch, which could be on anything from loose leaf class notes to an actual sketch book, and then depending on the look I'm going for, I'll use either Flash or Photoshop (or both) to make it look nice. I'm also looking into making stuff in Illustrator, but I don't really know how to use it very effectively as of yet. As for quality, I try to keep it as high as possible. I suppose for web-based images, it's nice to have quicker load times, and if you balance it right the compression isn't very noticeable, but on a local hard drive, file size really isn't an issue.
on June 8th, 2008
Has anyone tried Safari under Windows yet? I have it installed just to see if I can duplicate some of the issues I've heard about but it seems to have a different engine than the Mac version. We're working on scraping together a Mac system just to diagnose some of these problems. I've got an old G4 sitting here but I don't know if it's Leopard compatible.
on June 9th, 2008
What is this WINDOWS thing you speak of... like on a wall... to see through to a Safari... hmmmmm... to see lions and zebras?