Renter’s remorseĪdobe began in Los Altos, California, as an archetypal garage startup in the early 1980s. I wouldn’t go so far as to say the company is the reason I’m a socialist, but the day I signed up for that student membership in college, I unknowingly stumbled into a lesson about how capitalism cannibalizes the things we love, then sells the exploitation back to us dressed as innovation and personal freedom. Adobe is a seemingly intractable cancer on creative fields, its scamminess extending far beyond exorbitant cancelation fees. In April, a now-deleted tweet from an Australian user about a fee equivalent to US$217 inspired ire, discourse, and the deployment of this meme:Īnd it is, in my opinion, “always morally correct” to pirate Adobe products. Since then, I’ve watched a cycle involving Adobe repeatedly play out on social media: Every few months or so, someone posts on Twitter, Tumblr, or Reddit about being ripped off by the company to the tune of hundreds of dollars via a deceptive contract with steep cancelation fees, and for a day or two, the internet is ablaze with outrage. In 2017, the $19.99-per-month first-year student rate seemed like a small price to pay in service of my career aspirations. My college didn’t offer any design classes, so I embarked on a feverish course of self-study built on YouTube tutorials and books from the library.Ĭentral to becoming an employable graphic designer, I learned, was mastering the use of Photoshop, InDesign, and Illustrator, three of Adobe’s many proprietary applications.
It sounds silly, but at some point in my late teens, I became obsessed with the visual complexity of the thousands of images we encounter every day, enthralled by the mystery of how they’d been assembled. I’m a professional designer, and, yes, graphic design is my passion. Like millions of other people, I have owned my creativity through Adobe - or, at least, rented it for a monthly fee.
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