This month would mark the silver anniversary of the day I first started learning what is now referred to as the Adobe Creative Cloud suite. These days, most kids have mastered Photoshop by the time they enter high school. But there used to be a quainter period of world history when one typically acquired such skills in a formal educational setting. Back when Illustrator’s startup screen (and overall branding) famously depicted The Birth of Venus…
That period of history was so quaint that you could actually plunk down a one-time fixed sum for a program like Photoshop or Illustrator, which once paid would grant you unlimited use of the desired software ad infinitum until the day your computer retired to the great network in the sky. Good times, those were. Alas, those days are gone. Somewhere along the way, Adobe figured out that they could fleece even more money out of their loyal customers by renting their software as opposed to selling it. Now you can only download what amounts to a trial version (albeit a fully functional one with all the bells and whistles) that expires after a certain length of time. In order to continue using the software when that time runs out, those guys in San Jose demand you pay them for more time. Which also eventually runs out.
One of these days, we’ll figure out a way to freeze time. But until then, I decided to rent Illustrator for a month or two to work on some new visual concepts…
Five and ¾ Senses 