Reading a beautifully written computer graphics reference book such
as Olav Martin Kvern's Real World FreeHand 8 gives me real cause
for regret. A sense of loss for all those years I was unaware of
FreeHand and its wonderment. A sadness at what undiscovered creative highways and byways I was not to know of back then. An urgency to catch up for all that time of ignorance.
THE LAUREL GOES TO KVERN
These emotions are one of the best tributes one can make to an author of such a book, perversely, because they reveal just how skillful, how inspiring that author is. Having read Real World Freehand almost immediately after two other drawing application reference books, each by equally celebrated and bestselling authors, I have to hand the award for best vector graphics book to Kvern. Although the other contendors were books based on FreeHand's near-competitor, Illustrator, there is so much depth of vector graphics coverage in Real World it will stand good service to users of either program.
THE TRAITS OF A GOOD WRITER
One thing all three writers share is a sense of levity, regular flashes of wit to lighten what can be the tedious imparting of complex information. This is the first book I have read by Kvern and while he does not share the off-the-wall humour of a Deke McClelland or the loopy sidebar conversations of a Ted Alspach, his prose is light and clear and thanks to the book's design by Kvern and two collaborators is eminently readable as well. As soon as I opened Real World Freehand I was compelled to read it from cover to cover.
That experience was aided by the more than copious illustrations Kvern provides. In fact this the most illustrated book of its type that I have seen so far. It should win an award for the quality of its illustrations alone. Open any typical section - I have page 201 open right now - and you get Kvern's point at once. Here he is illustrating how he did a quick and dirty autotrace of an imported TIFF image in FreeHand using its Trace tool. Four screenshots that helped me really "get" the concept of autotracing at once, and how it can better boost my use of vector graphics.
And into the bargain, FreeHand appears to do it much better than Illustrator or Adobe's stand-alone tracing tool Streamline.
A DEPTH OF KNOWLEDGE LIKE FEW OTHERS
Kvern has accumulated years of experience in all forms of illustration, as a technical, medical, archaeological and veterinary illustrator, as a general-purpose book and magazine illustrator, and as a designer, typesetter, paste-up lackey and art director. He has put in the long, long shifts slaving over a hot Mac and standing nervously before imagesetters and film processors hoping beyond hope that the job has come out OK.
He has even been a vector graphics plug-in developer, contributing to Extensis' http://www.extensis.com/ excellent VectorTools package.
WHY BUY IT?
The back cover blurb proclaims a previous version of Real World Freehand as the all-time bestselling book on FreeHand. Having compared it with the only other Bible-sized tome on the same program the reason why is obvious. There is enough here to keep the FreeHand beginner sweating to catch up to the high standard Kvern sets for all users of the software (and convinces us is within all our reach nevertheless), and more than enough obscure stuff for longterm Freehand power users to glean from.
FreeHand is a deep and powerful program capable of many things: illustration, typography, small print publication design, and Web design. In the all too entrenched Macromedia tradition its manual is, to put it kindly, undersized. Reak World Freehand 8 is the software manual FreeHand just had to have.
