See, that’s a false dichotomy.

Modern corporate America demands expansion and growth. But expansion and growth do not need to be required for innovation.

That’s where Adobe is a victim of the vulture capitalists who’ve taken it over.

That gives me pause. And it’s not quite what I said.

When you try to integrate everything into the same application, you have to make compromises. Even if they have separate workflows, you’re not optimizing a tool for a specific use. You’re creating something general-purpose.

InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator are separate applications. That allows each to fully specialize in what it does best. And each one does a hell of a lot of things that would simply bog down the other two applications.

The applications need to integrate with each other. But no single application can be excellent at literally everything.

Edit: oh, Affinity is made by Canva? Yeah, I’m not touching that shit. No reason to trade one evil empire for another.

Unfortunately, until it fully integrates with a Photoshop equivalent and an Illustrator equivalent, it won’t be able to replace InDesign.

That’s why Adobe beat Quark. Their layout tool integrates so seamlessly with their raster and vector image editing tools.

It’s because Adobe truly does have the best feature set. It’s partly because they spent so many years building good software, and partly because they own patents that prevent other tools from operating in some of the same ways.

Adobe applications are interoperable. I can seamlessly move content between them. They all have the same interface and work in basically the same way. I can (and have) put together a 300 page book while taking advantage of many advanced automations. And back before Adobe went to shit, they really did put a lot of effort into making their interfaces intuitive.

And when you have 25 years of muscle memory dedicated to a set of tools, it’s REALLY difficult to completely replace your whole tool set.

Not interface. Experience.

Do a quick web search and you’ll learn all about Adobe patents on features.

Not if it’s for work, generally speaking.

While their boot is on your throat, it is difficult to mourn what your oppressor used to be.

They are better than they were. But they are still at least 10 years from being able to match Adobe software - partially because we need to wait for Adobe patents to run out, so that other software can replicate an intuitive software experience.

Yes.

Not for Adobe lol

I’m a creative. I’ve used InDesign since version 1.0. I’ve built my career with Adobe tools.

Adobe Creative Cloud peaked around ten years ago. Since then, it’s totally jumped the shark. I’m not even talking about the company, just the software and its features.

When I open InDesign, Photoshop, or Illustrator I’m trying to work. It’s software I’ve used for, in some cases, 25 years. My point is, I know it inside and out.

The past few years, every new “feature” gets in the way of my work. Adobe has been changing things that already worked very well, or has added extra steps to do something that used to be easy.

Even worse, Adobe has started to fill its software with notifications that can not be disabled. Invasive blue dots. Invasive blue buttons. Invasive blue overlays that stay visible on the screen even when the software is minimized. Rich tool tips that aren’t disabled by the option to disable rich tool tips.

Adobe has lost me as a devotee. It’s been taken over by venture capital. The company only cares about adoption of new features.

Now, I use it out habit. Because my workplace provides it. Because it’s what folks on my team are used to… but because they’ve come to the ecosystem so late, they only know a fraction of its capabilities.

If Adobe faces demise, I will mourn what if once was. But not what it has become.

Not wanting kids.

Why did you censor the word “French?”