As part of the More Nimble Laptop project, I’ve been testing a light- weight vector graphics app called Vector Designer.

I have to say, I like it better than Illustrator. That may be partly because I’ve never been a huge Illustrator fan, which is no doubt my fault for not really learning the program thoroughly. I have it for those rare occasions when I have to act like I know what I’m doing when it comes to print (which I really don’t; my specialty really is web design and publishing), but it has never captured me.

Vector Designer does capture me. It’s fun to play with. It’s Mac-like (and Mac-only). It totally trounces Fireworks when it come to creating smooth gradients that stay smooth on export. Text renders very cleanly. I really, truly like it. And the email support is superb–fast and friendly.

For my purposes, it works well enough to keep Illustrator’s big, gouty footprint off of my Nimble.

It does not, however, replace Fireworks, which really has no comparable product in the marketplace. I need Fireworks to to rapidly resize photos, to tell me the file size of the graphic I’ve just saved or am about to save, and to work with with bitmap and vector layers in the same document. It has been a part of my workflow for almost as long as I’ve been designing for the web.

The good news: I don’t have to give up Fireworks after all. There’s room for it on the Nimble and it runs just fine.

What’s that you say? No Adobe for 6 months? That didn’t last long did it?

I’m cheating. I admit it. It’s a lot harder to do without the Big Red A than I thought. Unless you consider that Dreamweaver and Fireworks were not created by Adobe, merely acquired when Adobe took over Macromedia.

As for that other Big Software name — I haven’t installed MS Office. I don’t think I’m going to need to. So far, none of my PC-based clients has noticed that I’ve switched away.