Vector in a Bitmap World
I have a confession: one of my secret passions is Bézier curves. You know, the ones first developed in 1959 by Paul de Casteljau and later named after French engineer Pierre Bézier, who employed them in his work as a designer for the Renault car company. For the first generation of digital designers in the 1980s, Bézier curves were what constituted their work, since Adobe Illustrator and PostScript fonts relied on these for the outlines of both graphical elements and type.
My personal epiphany came about in 1989, when as editor of a Canadian magazine devoted to electronic publishing (both "desktop" and high-end), I received a pre-release copy of CorelDRAW from Corel Corporation. Until then, Corel was a company I knew primarily as the developer of Ventura Publisher, a powerful tag-based document creation app for the PC, one of the few worth taking seriously at that time. I assume Corel sent me CorelDRAW because they knew I was one of the rare members of the media that saw a bright future for Windows-based graphics and publishing, a market completely dominated by the Mac.
I've never felt such a tingle of excitement after installing new software as I did with that still somewhat fragile version of DRAW. It simply blew Illustrator so far out the water that the two seemed to come from different planets. Perhaps this was due to my background as a sculptor but with DRAW I felt I could almost get my hands on those beautiful, screen-based curves, to push and pull them as desired into anything I could imagine. In contrast with Illustrator's approach, which many still find tedious.
It really was love at first sight, to the extent that I immediately contacted Peachpit Press and talked them into letting me put together what would be the first book devoted to DRAW. I went so off the deep end that in subsequent years I wound up authoring four DRAW books, contributed a monthly column for Corel Magazine, founded and published The CorelDRAW Journal, created and ran the CorelNET.com site for Corel, lead training seminars in DRAW, spoke at conferences... I just couldn't get enough of those magical Bézier curves. Like many infatuations, the intensity wasn't sustainable. But as Edith Piaf famously sung: "Moi, je ne regrette rien".
However, I guess old flames never die. This would explain why I have been having so much fun recently with the Bézier-based images on the CD accompanying Neubau Welt, published by Berlin-based Die Gestalten Verlag. Neubau Welt is the work of the Neubau team, also based in Berlin, and consists of a CD containing about 1,000 outlines of people and objects. Since they're provided in editable EPS format, those using such programs as Illustrator, FreeHand, Xara Extreme and yes, CorelDRAW can import them and rework the outlines as desired. They can also be used effectively within image editing apps like Photoshop. The images are loosely grouped in several categories, with the oversize book serving as a handy catalog. If the prospect of so many images is too daunting, you can purchase and download individual ones on the Neubau site for a modest price, and the team seems to be adding new ones to the collection.
Good for Neubau to create truly useful vector image components and for Die Gestalten Verlag to get the word out. If nothing else, it's worth a visit to the Neubau site to familiarize yourself with the collection, so that if you suddenly find yourself in need of an outline of a squid—or who knows what—you know where to go.
Neubau Welt can be purchased on the Die Gestalten Verlag site for $59.00.
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