For most graphic designers, illustrators, photographers, video editors, or anyone who makes content on a computer, it’s hard to imagine life without Adobe Creative Cloud, formally known as Adobe Creative Suite. The suite of products produced by Adobe Inc. has made work faster for any digital artist, allowing creative types to edit photography, video, and design with just a few clicks of a mouse or swipes on a tablet. As its suite of products has morphed and expanded over the years, Adobe Creative Cloud has inarguably become an indispensable collection of software, with its tentacles reaching into most digital artistic fields.
Adobe Creek, Los Altos California;
photo: Dick Lyon
photo: Dick Lyon
My relationship with the company started in 2002 with Photoshop Elements 2.0, a humble program with a one-time cost of $99. I quickly fell in love with how easy it was to edit photos and create designs, and I was soon posting my work to DeviantArt and participating in “Photoshop Battles” on graphic design forums. I partially owe my career to Adobe, and it’s one of the longest relationships I’ve been in—creative or otherwise—but now our relationship is far past the point of sunshine and rainbow gradients and deep into the “we need to talk” phase.
Prices have risen since the days of a single purchase of a $99 CD-ROM. As Adobe products have multiplied and expanded, so has the total cost of the mounting monthly subscription fees. Photoshop on its own currently costs $9.99 a month for an individual, with most other programs costing upwards of $20.99 a month. Their hot deal is their offer of the entire Creative Cloud for businesses at the low-low price of $89.99 a month. As a generalist graphic designer slash illustrator slash animator, I need all the apps, meaning I would spend $960 a year on average until I die or stop making content. As someone on the side of privilege, I can only think what it would be like to start out in a creative field and be expected to drop an additional $1,000 a year to afford the basic software to allow me to do my job.
Beyond the rising prices, Adobe has made efforts to ensure its users remain stuck within the Adobe universe in perpetuity. Adobe products have also struggled with increasingly large file sizes and bugs, all mostly due to more and more cloud-based integration. Most new features, such as Adobe Fonts, are often an attempt to keep users remaining in Adobe’s closed garden system as opposed to seeking other, better-designed means of working. Adobe has even sent letters1 to its users threatening to sue them for using older versions of their software. In one viral moment, one user even reported2 that they were charged $291 for canceling their Creative Cloud subscription, or in other words, the approximate cost of three copies of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. And in 2012, two Adobe products—Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash—were included in a list of the top ten “most hated programs of all time.”3 It’s been of no matter to Adobe, as their profits have continued to rise as they announce splashy releases at their Adobe MAX conferences with design luminaries such as Imagine Dragons, Jared Leto, and Dave Grohl.
Prices have risen since the days of a single purchase of a $99 CD-ROM. As Adobe products have multiplied and expanded, so has the total cost of the mounting monthly subscription fees. Photoshop on its own currently costs $9.99 a month for an individual, with most other programs costing upwards of $20.99 a month. Their hot deal is their offer of the entire Creative Cloud for businesses at the low-low price of $89.99 a month. As a generalist graphic designer slash illustrator slash animator, I need all the apps, meaning I would spend $960 a year on average until I die or stop making content. As someone on the side of privilege, I can only think what it would be like to start out in a creative field and be expected to drop an additional $1,000 a year to afford the basic software to allow me to do my job.
Beyond the rising prices, Adobe has made efforts to ensure its users remain stuck within the Adobe universe in perpetuity. Adobe products have also struggled with increasingly large file sizes and bugs, all mostly due to more and more cloud-based integration. Most new features, such as Adobe Fonts, are often an attempt to keep users remaining in Adobe’s closed garden system as opposed to seeking other, better-designed means of working. Adobe has even sent letters1 to its users threatening to sue them for using older versions of their software. In one viral moment, one user even reported2 that they were charged $291 for canceling their Creative Cloud subscription, or in other words, the approximate cost of three copies of Adobe Photoshop Elements 2.0. And in 2012, two Adobe products—Adobe Reader and Adobe Flash—were included in a list of the top ten “most hated programs of all time.”3 It’s been of no matter to Adobe, as their profits have continued to rise as they announce splashy releases at their Adobe MAX conferences with design luminaries such as Imagine Dragons, Jared Leto, and Dave Grohl.
Jason Levine performs his original song titled “Gather the Crowd” at the ADOBE MAX 2016 press conference, 2016
But how did we get here? Aside from the inevitable tendency of capitalism to squash innovation in the enduring pursuit of greed, are there other reasons why and how Adobe has been able to morph into the monopolistic beast that it is today? And is the Creative Cloud always going to be like this? Will I one day die due to a heart attack because of an especially devastating After Effects crash? In order to find answers about the present, we need to look at the past, and go back into the 1980s…
Marva Warnock, Adobe logo, 1982–1990
In 1987, Adobe Systems released Illustrator, a program that would forever alter the course of pen and paper. Its origin story was a humble one: John Warnock, a brilliant computer scientist co-founded Adobe in 1982 after leaving Xerox to invent PostScript, a graphic programming language that was later included in Apple’s Laserwriter (Steve Jobs had even tried to buy the company at the time for $5 million). The first software in the Creative Suite was Illustrator, which John invented for his wife, Marva Warnock. Marva was a graphic designer who, in his words, “couldn’t ink.”4 Her graphic design background had an immeasurable influence on him, and he wanted to build a program that would make her job easier. She would present John with the graphic designer’s toolset: rub down text, french curves, the Rapidograph—cumbersome objects that required skill and capital and were only available to those with proper training—and he would find ways to automate them on the computer. Marva’s first request was to digitally produce perfectly rounded corners, as whenever she needed them, her Letraset sheet never had the right size and if it did, it had often already been used. She would communicate her parameters to John, he would input them as code, and voila! A perfect rectangle with exact rounded corners would be printed from the computer.
John had now invented a programmatic language that described how to draw the page, replacing the boxy pixelated world of bitmap with beautiful bezier curves. With PostScript, instead of typefaces being rendered as they had with metal type (each font size needing a separate file), fonts and other vector forms could now be rendered at any size with just a single group of code. Through the development of Illustrator, Adobe was able to translate these codepoints into WYSIWIG tools, and two points in a curve could now be formed by a click of the pen. Instantaneously, drawing was automated and perfected.
Adobe knew that designers and illustrators would be skeptical of the new computer overlords coming to automate their industry, essentially wiping out the rapidograph in place of the computer. To assuage their worries, they evangelized Illustrator through public trade shows, setting up computers across the country and bringing in industry professionals to showcase the brave new world of beziers. Artists such as David Hockney were invited alongside the elite of New York City publishing: TIME magazine, LIFE, and The New York Times were shown5 the new dawn of the age of Adobe. They even went as far as to make a promotional video6 of designer and Adobe employee Luanne Seymour Cohen jumping out of an airplane to show that the leap that they were making wasn’t, in fact, so scary after all.
John had now invented a programmatic language that described how to draw the page, replacing the boxy pixelated world of bitmap with beautiful bezier curves. With PostScript, instead of typefaces being rendered as they had with metal type (each font size needing a separate file), fonts and other vector forms could now be rendered at any size with just a single group of code. Through the development of Illustrator, Adobe was able to translate these codepoints into WYSIWIG tools, and two points in a curve could now be formed by a click of the pen. Instantaneously, drawing was automated and perfected.
Adobe knew that designers and illustrators would be skeptical of the new computer overlords coming to automate their industry, essentially wiping out the rapidograph in place of the computer. To assuage their worries, they evangelized Illustrator through public trade shows, setting up computers across the country and bringing in industry professionals to showcase the brave new world of beziers. Artists such as David Hockney were invited alongside the elite of New York City publishing: TIME magazine, LIFE, and The New York Times were shown5 the new dawn of the age of Adobe. They even went as far as to make a promotional video6 of designer and Adobe employee Luanne Seymour Cohen jumping out of an airplane to show that the leap that they were making wasn’t, in fact, so scary after all.
Flashback 1982, 2019; photo:
San Francisco Business Times
San Francisco Business Times
What seems like a given to any graphic designer working today was, in fact, a huge revelation for the industry. What was once a profession whose primary goal was to clean up the roughness, set type perfectly, and draw everything by hand was now instantly “precise, perfect, and adjustable.” The skeptics who had assumed that Adobe would ruin the profession due to this newfound accessibility were of course proven wrong, but its impact could not be overstated.
In 1989, Adobe released Photoshop—originally under the name “Barneyscan XP”7—an image editing program for photographers that forever altered the course of producing pictures, pushing the uncanny valley forward and distorting beauty standards with a push of the liquefy tool. Photoshop became Adobe’s landmark product and is now so ubiquitous that the term “Photoshopped” is often used to describe any time an image is manipulated. In 1991, they released Premiere,8 a video editing software that is now the industry standard alongside Final Cut Pro and Avid. In 1993, Adobe released Adobe Acrobat Reader, introducing 9 their new invention—the PDF (originally called “The Camelot Project”)—to the world. In any creative industry where they couldn’t build a product themselves, they bought one—and in 1994, they acquired 10 Aldus Corp., which included PageMaker (later to become InDesign, the landmark layout design software for print designers), as well as After Effects, the premier tool for motion graphics. In 2003, they purchased 11 the aptly named Cool Edit Pro and renamed it Adobe Audition, adding music editing software to its suite of products.
In 2005, Adobe conquered its biggest rival Macromedia for a stock swap valued at approximately $3.4 billion, adding Authorware, ColdFusion, Contribute, Captivate, Breeze, Director, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, FlashPaper, Flex, FreeHand, HomeSite, JRun, and Presenter to their line of products.12 This was one of Adobe’s first forays into the world of web design, as Dreamweaver was an extraordinarily simple HTML editor that replaced Adobe GoLive, a different web design tool that Adobe had purchased13 in 1999. And in 2011, during the transitional period into Web 2.0, Adobe acquired Typekit,14 a popular web font hosting service. This move was part of Adobe’s strategy to integrate Typekit into what would later be aptly named Adobe Fonts, ensuring that users would never need to look beyond Creative Cloud for their typographic needs.
In 1989, Adobe released Photoshop—originally under the name “Barneyscan XP”7—an image editing program for photographers that forever altered the course of producing pictures, pushing the uncanny valley forward and distorting beauty standards with a push of the liquefy tool. Photoshop became Adobe’s landmark product and is now so ubiquitous that the term “Photoshopped” is often used to describe any time an image is manipulated. In 1991, they released Premiere,8 a video editing software that is now the industry standard alongside Final Cut Pro and Avid. In 1993, Adobe released Adobe Acrobat Reader, introducing 9 their new invention—the PDF (originally called “The Camelot Project”)—to the world. In any creative industry where they couldn’t build a product themselves, they bought one—and in 1994, they acquired 10 Aldus Corp., which included PageMaker (later to become InDesign, the landmark layout design software for print designers), as well as After Effects, the premier tool for motion graphics. In 2003, they purchased 11 the aptly named Cool Edit Pro and renamed it Adobe Audition, adding music editing software to its suite of products.
In 2005, Adobe conquered its biggest rival Macromedia for a stock swap valued at approximately $3.4 billion, adding Authorware, ColdFusion, Contribute, Captivate, Breeze, Director, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, FlashPaper, Flex, FreeHand, HomeSite, JRun, and Presenter to their line of products.12 This was one of Adobe’s first forays into the world of web design, as Dreamweaver was an extraordinarily simple HTML editor that replaced Adobe GoLive, a different web design tool that Adobe had purchased13 in 1999. And in 2011, during the transitional period into Web 2.0, Adobe acquired Typekit,14 a popular web font hosting service. This move was part of Adobe’s strategy to integrate Typekit into what would later be aptly named Adobe Fonts, ensuring that users would never need to look beyond Creative Cloud for their typographic needs.
One of the original pieces created in Adobe Illustrator, 1986; artwork by Ron Chan
A significant acquisition from the Macromedia deal was Flash, an animation software that, at the time, dominated the internet with its wild visualizations and interactive wizardry. Flash was beloved by animators and internet weirdos but despised by many—namely Apple—for a multitude of reasons, mostly concerning performance and opacity. Steve Jobs himself even went out of his way in 2010 to write a post titled “Thoughts on Flash”15 in which he waxed poetic about the early days of the two companies and then went on to outline six reasons why Flash was bad, very bad. Adobe couldn’t win against the future of the iPhone, which intentionally didn’t support Flash, and the program was deprecated in 2017 with Adobe announcing16 it would cease support for Flash by the end of 2020.
Throughout this story of Adobe creating and eating the entire business of visual tools, there was one early instance where the U.S. Government stepped in and tried to stop the madness. It involved Illustrator, the simple program John Warnock had built for his wife back in 1987. The 1994 Adobe purchase17 of Aldus Corp. included FreeHand, a direct competitor to Adobe Illustrator. In a rare stroke of intervention, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in and forced Adobe18 to sell the product back to Altsys and banned them from buying back Freehand or any other similar product for the next decade (1994–2004). Altsys was then bought by Macromedia, which in turn was acquired by Adobe in 2005, one year after they were legally allowed to purchase it.19 Adobe stopped all development on FreeHand, killing the product and the only major competing illustration program at the time. In an alternate universe, one where the American government was able to stop giant tech corporations from building monopolies on large swaths of industry, one can see a world where there were many different Adobe-Illustrator-like programs to choose from—programs that were updated regularly, listened to their users, and weren’t bogged down by cloud computing monthly charges. If you look beyond Adobe Creative Cloud, I think that world exists, and it may not be too far away.
Today, Adobe’s 300,000-square-foot offices in San Francisco’s SoMa district include a meditation pod, an arts and crafts room, and a music room called “Flashback 1982,” a reference to the year Adobe was founded. It’s a far cry from John and Marva Warnock’s garage and the Adobe Creek that ran behind their house and which the company was named after. With Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere, and later, with the acquisition of Macromedia, adding Flash and Dreamweaver to their empire, Adobe solidified its monopoly on the digital creative industry. Through their tactics of infiltrating insiders, convincing them that digital design was the wave of the future, they essentially took over all aspects of the creation in the design profession. With the power of capitalism behind them, Adobe became the standard as the advent of computers increasingly became the norm in schools, homes, and businesses. The metamorphosis from the slow world of cut and paste to the speedy world of point and click was likely inevitable, and Adobe just happened to be the corporation that pushed that world forward.
Throughout this story of Adobe creating and eating the entire business of visual tools, there was one early instance where the U.S. Government stepped in and tried to stop the madness. It involved Illustrator, the simple program John Warnock had built for his wife back in 1987. The 1994 Adobe purchase17 of Aldus Corp. included FreeHand, a direct competitor to Adobe Illustrator. In a rare stroke of intervention, the Federal Trade Commission stepped in and forced Adobe18 to sell the product back to Altsys and banned them from buying back Freehand or any other similar product for the next decade (1994–2004). Altsys was then bought by Macromedia, which in turn was acquired by Adobe in 2005, one year after they were legally allowed to purchase it.19 Adobe stopped all development on FreeHand, killing the product and the only major competing illustration program at the time. In an alternate universe, one where the American government was able to stop giant tech corporations from building monopolies on large swaths of industry, one can see a world where there were many different Adobe-Illustrator-like programs to choose from—programs that were updated regularly, listened to their users, and weren’t bogged down by cloud computing monthly charges. If you look beyond Adobe Creative Cloud, I think that world exists, and it may not be too far away.
Today, Adobe’s 300,000-square-foot offices in San Francisco’s SoMa district include a meditation pod, an arts and crafts room, and a music room called “Flashback 1982,” a reference to the year Adobe was founded. It’s a far cry from John and Marva Warnock’s garage and the Adobe Creek that ran behind their house and which the company was named after. With Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, Premiere, and later, with the acquisition of Macromedia, adding Flash and Dreamweaver to their empire, Adobe solidified its monopoly on the digital creative industry. Through their tactics of infiltrating insiders, convincing them that digital design was the wave of the future, they essentially took over all aspects of the creation in the design profession. With the power of capitalism behind them, Adobe became the standard as the advent of computers increasingly became the norm in schools, homes, and businesses. The metamorphosis from the slow world of cut and paste to the speedy world of point and click was likely inevitable, and Adobe just happened to be the corporation that pushed that world forward.
@xdaniel, “Alternatives to Adobe Programs List,” 2024
At the turn of the millennium, John Warnock retired as CEO and was succeeded by Bruce Chizen who had joined Adobe20 in 1994 as a part of their acquisition of the Aldus Corporation. Chizen tripled Adobe’s revenue and stepped down in 2007 to be succeeded21 by Shantanu Narayen.Aside from a dip during the 2009 recession where they laid off 680 employees,22 Adobe’s current business strategy has been fruitful. After switching to a subscription-only model in 2013—effectively hiking up the cost without changing the tools by switching to a month-to-month payment system—the company’s revenue more than quadrupled from 2013 to 2023, spiking revenue up from $4 billion in 2013 to over $19 billion in 2023.23 The change from a single payment to a monthly bill was saliently described by one user as “It’s like they’ve hooked everybody on digital heroin.”24 Adobe was the industry standard, and if you were to work in any sort of creative industry, you were expected to make the switch (and pay the price).
Adobe hasn’t been successful in eating every aspect of the design industry, however. In 2016, they released Adobe XD, a tool meant for designing web and mobile apps. It was a late entry for Adobe in this field, as a Dutch company called Bohemian Coding released Sketch in 2010,25 which over time became the premier product for digital product design. Sketch was later joined by Figma, which eventually surpassed Sketch to become the industry standard due to its collaborative toolkit and consistently improving feature set. The original suite of Adobe products was not built for this type of work, as opposed to Sketch and Figma which were created as digital-product-first design tools. Adobe failed to gain footing in the design industry’s most forward-thinking (in terms of technology) and theoretically profitable sectors, with most UI and UX designers completely ignoring Adobe XD, as it was a blatant clone of Sketch.
In true Adobe fashion, knowing they couldn’t beat them, Adobe tried to join them. In 2022, they attempted to acquire26 Figma for a staggering eye-popping $20 billion in cash and stock despite Figma’s CEO tweeting, “Our goal is to be Figma, not Adobe”27 just the previous year. Anti-competitive watchdogs in the UK and EU, and even in the US (thanks in part to the Federal Trade Commission chairman at the time, Lina Khan), objected to the deal, with the EU stating that the deal would “significantly reduce competition in the global markets (…) by eliminating Figma as a potential competitor, thereby strengthening Adobe’s dominance.”28 Due to the mounting pressure from these regulators, the deal fell through, and Adobe was required to pay Figma a reverse termination fee of $1 billion in cash.29 It was a small victory for everyday designers, as an Adobe purchase of Figma would have undoubtedly undermined what has become the new standard for quality design software.
Adobe hasn’t been successful in eating every aspect of the design industry, however. In 2016, they released Adobe XD, a tool meant for designing web and mobile apps. It was a late entry for Adobe in this field, as a Dutch company called Bohemian Coding released Sketch in 2010,25 which over time became the premier product for digital product design. Sketch was later joined by Figma, which eventually surpassed Sketch to become the industry standard due to its collaborative toolkit and consistently improving feature set. The original suite of Adobe products was not built for this type of work, as opposed to Sketch and Figma which were created as digital-product-first design tools. Adobe failed to gain footing in the design industry’s most forward-thinking (in terms of technology) and theoretically profitable sectors, with most UI and UX designers completely ignoring Adobe XD, as it was a blatant clone of Sketch.
In true Adobe fashion, knowing they couldn’t beat them, Adobe tried to join them. In 2022, they attempted to acquire26 Figma for a staggering eye-popping $20 billion in cash and stock despite Figma’s CEO tweeting, “Our goal is to be Figma, not Adobe”27 just the previous year. Anti-competitive watchdogs in the UK and EU, and even in the US (thanks in part to the Federal Trade Commission chairman at the time, Lina Khan), objected to the deal, with the EU stating that the deal would “significantly reduce competition in the global markets (…) by eliminating Figma as a potential competitor, thereby strengthening Adobe’s dominance.”28 Due to the mounting pressure from these regulators, the deal fell through, and Adobe was required to pay Figma a reverse termination fee of $1 billion in cash.29 It was a small victory for everyday designers, as an Adobe purchase of Figma would have undoubtedly undermined what has become the new standard for quality design software.
Michael Oswell, 2017
As many Adobe users’ perceptions of its products have soured over time (as a quick Twitter search30 will find), so has the appetite to seek out alternative tools. Thanks to a number of developers who have built a suite of alternatives to Adobe Creative Cloud, designers are no longer fully without agency in their relationship with Adobe. Graphic designer Daniel Calderón maintains a list31 of these products, one that grows every few months, as developers and designers are seeing the opportunity to build tools that are more affordable, open-source, and diverse in their toolset. I now use Affinity Photo in place of Photoshop as it delivers essentially the same tools at a much greater speed with a one-time cost of $50 (half the price of Photoshop Elements 2.0!) as opposed to an exploitative subscription-based model. This is by no means an endorsement of Affinity, which has an entire suite of Adobe replacements, as handing over the reins from one creative corporation to another is not a long-term solution that benefits the design community. In fact, in 2024, Affinity was purchased by Canva32—the hugely successful app aimed at non-designers, offering drag-and-drop templates for everything from Instagram posts to pitch decks—a sale that does not bode well for the future of Affinity and its suite of products.
It’s hard to imagine what the world would look like without Adobe Creative Cloud and there’s no denying that the way it has intertwined in almost every creative’s life seems essential, but as Ursula Le Guin similarly described capitalism: “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” I don’t know where I would be without the work of John and Marva Warnock, but in a world without Adobe Inc., at the very least, I would be saving $89.99 a month, plus fees.
It’s hard to imagine what the world would look like without Adobe Creative Cloud and there’s no denying that the way it has intertwined in almost every creative’s life seems essential, but as Ursula Le Guin similarly described capitalism: “Its power seems inescapable. So did the divine right of kings.” I don’t know where I would be without the work of John and Marva Warnock, but in a world without Adobe Inc., at the very least, I would be saving $89.99 a month, plus fees.
An earlier version of this essay,33 edited by Ann Madden, was published in the Design Harder Newsletter on November 11, 2021.