I've long felt myself something like an imposter here, in that unlike most of you I'm decidely a lay user of these technologies—rather, of a specialized subset of same, for I'm first and foremost a Mac guy, and such expertise in system maintenance as I've acquired over the years is part consequence of no one backstopping me in my Windowcentric organization. Actually it wasn't a Windowcentric organization back in 1987 when they first set me up with a Mac SE, a LaserWriter Plus and copies of Pagemaker 2.0 and Illustrator 1.0: that SE was the first standalone computer in the building, and I owned the so-called "desktop publishing" franchise not just locally but, so far as the clueless employer could see it, throughout our North American operations until the mid-nineties. Ah, those early years! My output was White Man's Magic! Alas, the employer finally equipped itself with Wintel boxes, with their then-primitive graphic capabilities (I acknowledge that, of course, my Reagan-era Mac output does not look impressive by modern standards), and even though my own product, informed by then by years of experience, was superior to the interloper tech, I hadn't reckoned with the tastelessness of the internal customer base, which in the event proved as impressed with sub-mediocre Microsoft clip art as it had formerly been with my artfully-assembled collages of scanned images. As the whole of the in-house art department I am by way of being something like one of those persons who is recognized as a musician even though his oeuvre consists of selecting, digitizing and mixing samples of other artists' sounds.

This is by way of providing context for my tribute to Adobe Illustrator, upon which I first laid my hands at around this time 18 years ago (we purchased it with that first Mac SE system, but the program had just been released, and the vendor had to give it to us as a bootleg copy sans documentation—Illustrator shipped in its first incarnation on a single 800K floppy; I could begin no serious work until the documentation at last arrived in early November). I well remember my first struggles with the program, which was ludicrously underpowered compared to its latter iterations, and far more forbidding in its protocols than any of the other Mac graphics packages I'd worked with in the three years since my then-wife brought that first 128kb jobbie home, but I stuck with it because it shipped with...Bezier curves! O, frabjous joy! All at once an entire raft of capabilities I'd been missing in MacPaint and MacDraw lay within reach. I've ridden Illustrator forward since then (with each successive upgrade on my own dime, since my shop has never been blessed with a formal budget) to the present v.10 (actually there are one or two others out since then, but 10 is where I'm obliged to pause for the nonce, for reasons not sufficiently interesting to set out here). There was a certain advantage to coming in at the beginning of the movie, since each advance in Illustrator has reached me with an adequate number of months of experience with each previous iteration under my belt. Best of all is that certain skill-sets have remained relevant since 1987: the pen tool operates as it has since v.1, and since its manipulation actually appears to draw upon some physical memory-muscles, I have the benefit of all those years of day-in/day-out experience: I'm a damned good Illustrator jockey.

This has come to mind the past nine days, as I've designed an event program cover for next month. For the past few years my employer has at this time of year seconded me to a professional organization associated with our discipline to design and typeset its annual awards banquet program. Each year has a theme; this one is "[discipline] Superheroes." Hey, they don't consult me. As a matter of course, because a certain amount of my workproduct is strictly in-house and may safely disregard IPR issues, I have accumulated a number a graphics from various sources to be hoarded for the scanner against future use, and when I learned of this year's theme i instantly thought of an illustration that had been sitting in my filing cabinet since, oh, the days of Illustrator 1.0. It depicts a (cough, cough) rather well-known (hack, hack, wheeze, cough) superhero (ack! ack!) of the cape-and-tights variety (cough) that perfectly suits the event. It's a magnificent example of comic art, and over the course of the last nine days I have used a hi-res scan of it to build, crosshatch-by-crosshatch, an Illustrator version in living vector. My artistic contribution to this undertaking is of course zilch. My technical contribution is a hundred percent, and I'm feeling rather proud of myself as an Adobe Illustrator technician. I have spent about sixteen hours on this file, and while such beauty as the source image possessed is properly credited entirely to its creators (two are credited), I feel entitled to claim the acknowledgment of the technical expertise that its meticulous re-creation required.

Of course, of course...

Of course I have no right to help myself to the visual identity originally created by (cough, cough) a couple of dead guys who were (wheeze, hack, cough) largely screwed out of their rights by syndicate lawyers decades ago, so that AOL-Time-Warner (or whoever) has an absolutely uncontested moral right to the (gasp) superhero that might be imagined to have served as the basis for my program artwork...

Fortunately it's a rather small event. 250 copies of the program, max. I've done all the work at home, to spare the employer some measure of liability. But the program cover is going to be good. And along with the aforementioned pride I suspect that, acknowledging that there are thousands of gifted artists and designers out there beside whose Illustrator chops my own are negligible, there are probably not, say, twenty-five thousand Illustrator users in North America who could have rendered this image as well as I did in the time I had available. And while I preen myself on the talent acquired in 18 years of practice I'd like to salute Adobe Systems for making these tools available these many years past.

cordially,