

Somehow the symmetry of anchor points is not symmetrical if you outline a stroke that’s curve and on a diagonal. That’s when that sadistic ghost pixel actually chases you around your screen, also known as reverse Pac-Man in the office. I pan it off the screen, it’s gone, I zoom out it’s back. I see it, I zoom in, it’s staring me in the face. It’s there, it’s not there, it’s having an existential crisis. It’s obvious what you have to do after you see that! Never again Illustrator… If you go to options in the Pathfinder palette, you will most likely find precision is set to 0,028pt, and Remove Redundant points is unchecked. The secret is hidden in pathfinder defaults. Have you ever added two shapes in Pathfinder after putting in the effort of snapping objects to a grid, a pixel, or even aligning those suckers to each other, only to have your straight line become littered by points? Oh I have. For the pain pathfinder has caused me as a result of this 0,028 pt, it warrants a mention. Honestly I don’t even know what 0,028 pt stands for, or why it’s appropriate as the default value for pathfinder operations in a vector program. You can draw a 3 sided triangle in Polygon shape mode, why are you pretending you can’t do to it in Star mode? Removing those extra points off a few hundred icons could have been time better spent re-watching True facts about the Octopus and squirming. The worst part is that most of the suck seems to be glitches that fuel paranoia, and worse, waste my time.


For those pixel perfect icons, you kinda suck. Sure we’ve had good times, but this isn’t one of them. Here at The Artificial, you have been helping us to make pixel-precise, scalable icons for to. I’m sorry that I have to say this, but I’m fairly sure if I don’t, no one else will. In any event, that’s not what we need to talk about today. I just lost the attention of non-designers. I feel your pain: especially while I’m trying to do a sexy blended drop shadow, gaussian blur in-one with a crazy clipping mask and a 20% opaque stroke. I understand your strengths, your quirks, and perhaps brutally, I know your limitations. Over the last decade we have spent so much time together that I think I know you better than I know myself. I am writing this open letter as a close friend.
