I'm leaving you Adobe

Let me tell you about warp. That’s right, warp. This amazing ability that Illustrator has where you can make a vector shape and then make a deformable mesh on top of it that you can tweak around and well, warp a bit. Sounds epic doesn’t it? What an amazing feature they’ve come up with. For some sad, strange reason I had an obsession with the concept of not being able to do this, even though every time I’ve used the tool it was difficult and ended up looking like absolute shit anyhow. This is what it boils down to, Adobe throwing everything under the sun at you and wedging in heaps of loss aversion through the door and down your throat.

So I’m trying to leave you and it ain’t going to be easy. Adobe, you’ve weaved your tentacles into my life in ways and formats that will be incredibly hard to shake. But I look forward to the challenge and to breaking free till one day I can make it without drowning in your bloat and effluence every time I have to make some sort of image or put some words on a picture.

But you’ve made it so hard to leave you. You’ve ingrained yourself everywhere in my life and in my consciousness. You’ve gone through my phone and who I’ve called and told me how to hold a fork. You’ve been with me through bad and good. We’ve cried together, lasted up all night with a half empty bottle of whiskey, tears and all the memories that go with that one Strokes album. You were there. You’re now a verb because you are everywhere.

Part of breaking away is opening your eyes. I haven’t opened InDesign in over a year. I haven’t done any photo type thing to an actual image in over a year and even when I do, I only use some basic stuff. What you have to realise is that you don’t really need all the bells and whistles and you don’t need one company dictating what the creative output of the planet is.