When Macromedia was bought out by Adobe and FreeHand was left to wither on the shelf, I thought I'd die. Seriously, I love this program. I've used it since the first version on my Mac SE with a 20MB hard drive and 1.4MB of RAM. FreeHand was doing things in 2000 that Illustrator still doesn't do in 2009! That said, it still works! Really. If you work in a company that still has FreeHand, you're not out of luck. The only problem is that most print shops don't support native FreeHand files. That's easily worked around by saving your files as EPS. They print just fine from any PostScript printer, thank you. If you're working on the Web, then there's no problem at all - save your files as JPEG or GIF. Adobe Illustrator CS versions open native FreeHand files. Okay, remember I said "open." They're a little clumsy, but the job is still workable. Text will be wonky, but just reformat it. Gradient fills turn into a segmented mass of thin slices of color - not a good prospect. To fix them, isolate the gradient fill, make swatches from the key colors, and recreate the blend in Illustrator. It doesn't take but a few minutes and your file looks as if it were produced in FreeHand.

So, if you want to get into graphic arts on the computer in a down and dirty way, you can pick up a copy of FreeHand on eBay, and you may even still be able to purchase it from Adobe, although they don't support it any longer. The Casual FreeHand MX Course is all the help you'll need to get up and running. If you need more inspiration about purchasing the course, click here.