My History with Adobe

You might know me as a Front-End Developer and you'd be right, that's what I do in my day to day, that's what I do for work, that's what I teach in various universities and collages and that's what I do in my free time. But before all that I worked as a Motion Designer and a Product Designer for years, I actually stumbled upon Front-End Development through Product Design and not the other way around.

In all my design career of about 2 decades or so I used Adobe products. As a Motion Designer I used Adobe After Effects, I used Flash (yes, before it was called Animate), I used Adobe Premiere and Audition.

As a Product Designer I also used Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Dreamweaver, Muse and even Adobe XD (not all at once, of course).

I am exactly the kind of person that edits all his photos in Photoshop before sending them, the kind that cuts his own videos from vacation in After Effects and the kind that builds a quick website just to send his portfolio to a potential job opportunity.

I started with Adobe in high school, I learned Photoshop and Freehand, which was a Macromedia software very similar to Adobe Illustrator, Later Adobe would buy Macromedia and implement Freehand’s features into Adobe Illustrator.

At this point when I was 15 or 16 I used a pirated copy of Photoshop, Adobe didn’t have its Creative Cloud yet so once you’d have a pirated copy - you’ll have it forever. I started using Photoshop 6 and quickly got my hands on Photoshop 7, which I remember to be a big step up in 2002 (I was 18 at this point).

After a few working opportunities at this young age, I realized this is what I wanted to do with my life and I went to design school for a 4 year BFA program.

During that time I learned Flash, After Effects, Premiere and Audition, all for animation purposes and all were very professional tools with no competition in the industry, I would argue that After Effects remains an industry leader with little competitors to this day.

At this point my design school was taking care of my licenses, Adobe had (and still do) a big student discount and my school took care of it for its students, I’m sure I paid for it with some start of the year fee for equipment and such, but it was nice anyway.

When I got into the job market I already knew most of adobe programs - and still it took me a few months to get my first job, which required me to learn even more software. I learned a lot of Autodesk 3Ds MAX and a bit of Blender.

My background with After Effects helped me a ton in post-production and I became a 3D artist, at this point I even started to use Adobe Fireworks (RIP) for textures.

My workplace paid for the software and licenses, this was an era of desktop computers, 3D work and After Effects could have been done on a laptop, but not seriously. Computers would have been beefed up specifically to run these programs (back when 8GB of RAM was a lot).

I was an OK 3D artist but eventually I went full After Effects for a while and became a 2D Animator/ Visual Effects artist, I worked for a small company and we mostly did Kid’s shows that can be animated quickly in After Effects.

Until one day my boss had an idea - what if this studio had a website, I know it was long ago and all.

He called me up to his office and he knew I had some experience with HTML since I sent him a website of my portfolio when I started working there (apparently other designers and artists were sending video reels or PDF files).

So it was there where I learned Adobe DreamWeaver, Muse and Brackets so I can whip up some web presence for the studio and this was they’re website for about 3 years.

As I started do more and more HTML and worked closer with developers suddenly my designs (that were all for digital products at this point: websites, interactive tours, online presentations etc.) that I was doing in Photoshop and/or Illustrator felt silly.

They felt like I’m making presentations for the developers on how to build the websites instead of doing the designs for real websites, they lacked responsive and understanding of what can be done with CSS and how, sometimes I would make designs that were almost impossible to develop in time for a certain deadline.

I discovered Figma by accident but it was almost everything I was hoping for and I started championing it in my company, all of my designs were made in Figma and I urged other designers in my company to make the leap too.

They didn’t, or at least not while I was still there, I did quit during the 2020 pandemic and started to work for a studio that was all-in on Figma. At this point I was still using Adobe products like Photoshop and After Effects but less so since I was very excited about Figma.

Today I work mostly in a code editor, but Figma remains the design tool I'm working with and it's in use by any other designer I work with too, I can’t remember the last time anyone sent me a PSD or an AI file.

If I absolutely need something done in Photoshop or Illustrator, I just use Affinity, they have most of the tools I need from Photoshop and Illustrator and I was using it on my iPad anyway so it’s not really unfamiliar to me.

Instead of Premiere I just use DaVinci Resolve, instead of Audition I use Audacity, Flash is dead anyway so I just make HTML/CSS animations in my code editor instead.

The only software from Adobe I sometimes still need in After Effects, and I have a full Adobe license from my workplace so I could use any Adobe software I want. I just don’t want to use Adobe, I don’t like them anymore.

Just like I don't like Adobe anymore, a lot of people who use Adobe - artists, designers, video editors and compositors - don't like Adobe anymore. As a company Adobe burned a lot of good will from its users with unfair pricing, predatory business models and poor communications.

Adobe had put their bottom line before its users and people are (right to be) pissed. Affinity went to the free route and people on the Internet cheered, they took some market share from Adobe users instantly since people hate Adobe so much.

If I need to think about another big companies people hate in the same way - Microsoft comes to mind, every year they do something their user base doesn't like.

As a result, people publicly trash on Microsoft all the time, people also move to MacOS for work and to Linux (like the successful Steam OS) for gaming, at this point the only users left on Microsoft Windows are the Excel fanatics, which is a real community.

Adobe getting weaker in combination with Microsoft getting more hate than ever with Microsoft Windows could mean people will flock to Linux professionally as well. Right now work happens on MacOS mostly and with Apple chips becoming more and more powerful - I don't see people flocking back to Windows anytime soon.

Adobe will never die completely, it has its own ad network and its own font store (TypeKit) and those things alone can keep it afloat but if their business model won't change, their predatory fees will keep new users out, Adobe can see the flocking Microsoft had seen to MacOS sooner rather than later.

Programs like Figma and Affinity (and Krita, Blender, Penpot etc.) are not the future, they are very much the present and people flock to them because they hate Adobe, and that's not a good place for Adobe to be in.