Back in 2007, I learned the craft of a graphic designer on the tools that defined an era: Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign. For the real oldies in the room, I even learned Quark Xpress (which, shockingly, still exists).
For years, Adobe was the air we breathed (not the product Adobe AIR 😅). We learned from it, we worked in it, and we built our careers with it.
Then, in 2013, Adobe switched to a subscription-only model, and the walls of the creative world closed in. They had us. We needed their tools to work, and they knew it.
Let’s be honest about the early days. Before the subscription prison, many of us learned the tools through… but a lot were not legal copies. It was a common practice, born from one simple fact: the software was prohibitively expensive. Adobe’s subscription-only move didn’t fix this; it just forced the high price on everyone.
From a business perspective, it’s smart, but not so much for the users!