Mind Blown

I learned two things today that have created a kind of seismic shift in my workflow:

1. You can put custom fonts on the iPad
2. Adobe Illustrator works superbly on the iPad now

1 is a little convoluted; you do need an additional program to get them on there. Illustrator can do it, and there are other programs like AnyFont that can as well. But you can!

2 is huge to me. I mean, like, ginormous. I tried and tried to find a solution to using a pen/tablet with desktop Illustrator. Nothing fit me right, and I tried a billion strategies, but magic trackpad was always faster and more comfortable. I tried iPad Illustrator a few years back and it was just so hobbled and slow and missing features - it just didn't work for me, and I let it fall by the wayside.

So I've been using Fresco, which I like well enough, and does some really great things as it's able to do both pixel and vector. But it's really only been good for sketching, requiring clean up in desktop Illustrator later.

But I just opened Illustrator on the iPad this morning, to check on a file and WOW. It's amazing now. It's essentially got all the desktop stuff (well, the stuff I use, anyway). So now I can DRAW with a PEN - actual paths, not just blob brush like in Fresco, getting the gorgeously precise images I want. I am over the moon, I tell ya, over the moon.