MicrostockGroup

Out from the dark ages!  Who'd of thought they'd ever update the standard from the ancient AI 8 EPS?!  I'm crossing my finger that this change will be implemented smoothly. 

announcement:
http://www.istockphoto.com/forum_messages.php?threadid=337037&page=1

LOL! It does seem that the only news that actually arrives in a timely fashion at iStock, is bad news! 
When I started my port on a whim, something to do while waiting for edits and approvals on my day job.  It's been a pretty decent year for me at iStock. It might have been a great year if they hadn't tried so hard to screw me.  I'm hesitant to submit elsewhere, I don't want to sell JPEGs of my vectors.  I need to research the micros and figure out what's good for me.  I keep hoping things will get better at iStock, but they seem bound and determined to self destruct!

Awesome, I hope it happens. Could be a big boost to earnings.

Surely this will exclude some buyers, but frankly I think that's not our problem or the agencies' problems. I think it's still more than generous to make the industry standard file format one that's 10 years old (EPS10 arrived in 2001). If some software still can't handle EPS10, that's really on the software makers more than anyone. They've had a decade to get their software to play nice with transparency and other aspects of the EPS10 format.

Their customers will surely be the ones to suffer because of it, but I don't think it's right to ask the stock image industry to stick with the even older EPS8 format just because some software manufacturers refuse to get their applications to work with modern file formats.

I thought it was a PostScript issue. Something about CorelDraw not working with level 3. But I'm not sure that's still an issue with the latest version of CorelDraw. In any case, it doesn't seem to be a proprietary software issue (some applications even work with the AI format (which is certainly proprietary) and more an issue of what the software makers do with their products to allow them to play nicely with newer formats. I think the conflict is still rooted in software restriction rather than file format restrictions, and the onus is still on the manufacturers to develop solutions that allow greater file importing compatibility.

I'm guessing that CorelDraw is still the major alternative to Illustrator that is a cause for concern, but I think the problem is Corel's to deal with, and it's not necessarily the fault of Adobe. Besides, it's not like Corel is a shining example of compatibility. The software is still Windows-only, which is baffling givien the industry they target with their products.


Frankly that's on the designer to deal with. I'd rather provide a file that includes transparency in a drop shadow for example, than a file that has a fake drop shadow with a solid background color. That makes the image unusable with the shadow on anything other than the original background. Designers surely have to be annoyed to buy a set of EPS8 icons with dropshadows over white, only to find that they can't use those same icons over any other colored background because the shadow blends to solid white.

I'd rather give them a true shadow and greater ease of use of the file than limit the use because of printing concerns. If printing was such a major concern, I'd think the agencies would require vector files to be in the CMYK color space anyway.

I'm a vector artist.

Eps 10? Ok, good movement. No reason to wooo-yays.

Just in case anyone still wants to contribute to istock, this has now gone live.