I've Got A Bad Feeling About This: Adobe Creative Cloud

Last week, in a move seemingly designed to piss off 98% of their customer base, Adobe announced that they'll no longer be selling their Creative Suite software in physical form. From now on it'll be called Adobe Creative Cloud and will only be available for downloading at the low, low subscription fee of $50 a month ($30 if you just want one piece of the Suite such as Photoshop).

That's right, for just $600 a year you'll be granted the privilege of renting their software (yes, I know that according to the user agreement everyone accepts that's been the case all along, but still...)..

Adobe officials are of course touting this as a good thing for their customers. In a press release they had this to say, in a spectacular piece of MarketSpeak™:

“The urge to be creative is universal, and harnessing the creative spark – in everyone from school children to creative pros – has never been more important,” said Shantanu Narayen, president and chief executive officer, Adobe. “Wherever and whenever inspiration strikes, Adobe will be there to help capture, refine and publish your ideas.”

“We launched Creative Cloud a year ago and it has been a runaway success,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president and general manager, Digital Media, Adobe. “By focusing our energy -- and our talented engineers -- on Creative Cloud, we’re able to put innovation in our members’ hands at a much faster pace.”

Wow, how Mr. Narayen managed to say all that without bursting out laughing, I have no idea. I bet he was sore the next day! 
 
See, by charging us a monthly fee our ol' pal Adobe is doing us all a favor, dontcha know? From now on we'll never have to worry about not having the latest software because we'll be constantly forced to upgrade. It's a win-win situation!

They're not fooling anybody. The only ones who'll benefit from this boneheaded idea is Adobe. This is a cash grab, pure and simple. A cash grab so transparent you can read the newspaper through it. Now instead of a burst of revenue every time they release a new, slightly different version of their software that ain't worth the trouble they'll have a steady, monthly revenue stream from now until the end time.

Adobe knows all too well that most people keep their software for years until the day it finally stops working on their computers. Not any more! Now you'll be forced to upgrade whether you want to or not, and if you don't upgrade, Adobe will kill it. Right there on your machine! Because you don't own their software now, remember? You're only renting it. And they don't have to rent to you if they feel you're not worthy.

I'm also 100% positive they're doing this to stem the dreaded scourge of piracy. I will admit this is probably a legitimate concern for them. Everybody knows someone with a copy of Photoshop that they don't mind sharing. While I don't encourage piracy, I can definitely understand it. When your software package costs well over $1,500 motherfrakin' dollars it's only natural that some consumers are going to be reluctant to pay for it.

Many have said that the new subscription price of $600 a year will be a substantial savings over the old purchase price. That's certainly true if you rush out and upgrade every time Adobe releases a new version. The thing is, nobody does that. I don't know a single person who feels compelled to do so. Everyone I know keeps whatever CS version they have indefinitely. Even the various companies for which I've worked have done this, upgrading as an absolute last resort. When you look at it that way that $600 a year ain't no bargain.

An extra $50 a month probably won't be too big a burden for most corporations, but this is gonna kill small Mom & Pop companies.

It'll be especially painful for freelancers whose income fluctuates from month to month. I have a feeling many small-time freelancers are gonna fall by the wayside.

And what about casual users? People who aren't freelancers but just like playing around in Photoshop or InDesign for their own amusement? Screw you, that's what. Adobe just made your fun little hobby very damned expensive.

One of the many "benefits" Adobe is loudly trumpeting is that by subscribing you'll always have the absolute latest version of their software with all their brand new features and improvements that no one asked for. The thing is, the vast majority of consumers will never use any of this stuff. I've been using Photoshop since the early 1990s and there are features I've never used and never will. I have no use for them or even any idea what they do. All that these needless bells and whistles do is bloat the software and make it take longer to start up. 

Once you start subscribing, how will all these new features be updated on your computer? By downloading them, that's how. I don't like the sound of that. Do you have Adobe Acrobat on your computer? If so, did you ever notice how it'll bug you for days and days that there's a new version and you need to drop what you're doing and upgrade immediately? And then after a week of these annoying alerts, you finally throw up your hands and say , "Alright already!" and download the ferkakta thing and then it restarts tour computer and immediately tells you that there's yet another upgrade available. Get ready for even more of that.

And how long do you think it'll take to download all this stuff over even a fast connection? Minutes? Hours? I pity people in rural areas who still have dial-up.

Another annoyance: the way I understand it you'll need a working internet connection to use the new Creative Cloud. That's so the software can periodically send out a message to Adobe letting them know it's on your computer, it's the current version and most important of all that it's paid for. If you don't upgrade religiously or can't afford the subscription this month the software will tattle on you and Adobe will remotely disable it. Nice of them, eh? 

"Creative Cloud" indeed. A foul and noxious cloud that issued straight from Adobe's bum hole.

As you may have guess by now, I do not plan on subscribing to Adobe Creative Cloud for $600 a year. I'm still using Photoshop 7 and I get along just fine. It does everything I need for the kind of work I do and I'm gonna keep using it until the day it finally stops working. What are you gonna do, Adobe? Come to my house and take it back?

Good luck with your new customer-screwing endeavor, Adobe. You're not the only game in town, you know. The biggest and most popular yes, but not the only. Looks like it's time to start learning SketchBook Pro. And if that fails, there's always pen and paper.

Psst! Hey, Buddy!

Mr. Johnson was walking home from the office and made the mistake of making eye contact with someone on the street.

Sadly, that was the last anyone saw of Mr. Johnson.

This was a very quick (about two, maybe three hours) little experiment to see if I could make a kind of soft focus illustration in a vector program (which generally is best for creating sharp, hard edges). The result: I'll let the viewer decide, but I think it worked.

Drawn all in InDesign.

Here's the original sketch. Not much to look at, but I guess I saw some potential in it somewhere.

Davros

I'm working on another Doctor Who Infographic, this time featuring the Doctor's enemies. It's slow going, so in the meantime I thought I'd post a sneak peek at one of the characters.

Davros is a member of the Kaled race from the planet Skaro. The Kaleds fought a thousand year war with their enemies the Thals (also from Skaro). Centuries of radioactive warfare mutated and weakened the Kaleds to the point where they couldn't survive on their own.

Davros decided that in order to save the Kaleds he must mutate them even further, to their ultimate evolutionary state. He built special mobile life support units for them, thus creating the Dalek race. As a final touch, he stripped them of all emotion, save for a hatred of all things not Dalek.

At some point in the past Davros was injured and crippled in an unexplained accident. Like his Dalek creations, he can't survive outside his special life support chair. Blind, he sees through a single cybernetic eye and has only one functioning hand. He is a megalomaniac and tends to give frequent overwrought and over-the-top speeches, usually about how he plans to destroy the Doctor.

Davros has seemingly died or been killed on several occasions, but like all good villains, somehow always manages to come back to plague the Doctor and the universe at large.

Michael Wisher originated the role in the 1975 episode Genesis of the Daleks. Like most Doctor Who characters, Davros has been portrayed by multiple actors, most recently by Julian Bleach in 2008.

Davros is a vector drawing, done all in InDesign. At first I was going to leave off the coiled red wires around his head, because I thought it would be too tough to draw them in a vector program. But I thought I'd give it a go and after a few tries I came up with some curly wires I could live with.

Want to see more? Check out my new blog! All the cool kids are doing it!
I'm also on Twitter for some reason.

The Conversation

Hmm, I wonder what they could be talking about? Who conducted the better recording of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, Leonard Bernstein or Herbert Von Karajan? Perhaps they're discussing which is the better wine, Mounton Rothschild or Chateau Margaux? Or maybe who was the hotter monster mom, Lily Munster or Morticia Addams?

We may never know.

This is a vector drawing, done all in InDesign.

The Eleven Doctors

I'm a big fan of Doctor Who, and now that I finally finished my individual drawings of the eleven Doctors, I thought I'd combine them all into one image. One incredibly long image.

I've only seen bits and pieces of the first three Doctors, so I have to admit I don't really have much of an attachment to them. Like most Americans, my "first" Doctor was Tom Baker-- he defined the role for me and was my favorite for many years. I liked Peter Davison, Doctor #5 a lot as well. I've only seen one episode each of the Sixth and Seventh Doctors, which isn't really enough to judge them fairly. I thought the Eighth Doctor was OK; too bad he only got to appear one time. I enjoyed Christopher Eccleston's Ninth Doctor, and was sorry to see him go after only one season. David Tennant's Tenth Doctor quickly became my all time favorite. Matt Smith is no slouch as the Eleventh Doctor though. He won me over by the end of his first episode.

I really like the new series (or NuWho, as some fans call it) that started up in 2005. Although the old series had its charm, what with the cardboard sets and paper mache aliens, it's nice to finally see the show done with a larger budget and modern production values. 

I tweaked a couple of the drawings for this group portrait, fixing some little things that were bugging me. I think the blue background might be a little intense. I may have to desaturate it a bit. When you've got eleven characters it's tough to find a color that goes with them all.

You can get a better eye full of the Eleven Doctors over here.

All eleven Doctors are vector drawings, done entirely in InDesign.

While I was messing around with the main image, I accidentally changed all the drawings to solid black. I kind of liked the way they looked and decided to post it. I was amazed that you can still tell which Doctor is which even in silhouette.

Space Dweebs

 

It's the adventures of the Space Dweebs!

I feel like they have some potential, but I have no idea what to do with them. I need to let them simmer some more.

This is a vector illustration, drawn all in InDesign.

 

This illustration started life as just the yellow alien. I'm not sure why, but it just didn't do much for me. Maybe because he didn't seem all that dweebish to me. So it was back to square one and I reworked him and added his two friends.

  

Here's the original sketch of the Space Dweebs, which admittedly isn't much to look at.

Evil Thoughts

Looks like someone's thinking some dark thoughts.

This is a vector drawing, done in InDesign. OK, so I cheated a little and added a bitmapped grunge texture to the background.

 

Here's the very rough original sketch.

Lest you think that all my illustrations just fall out of the mouse fully formed, here's a look at the InDesign pasteboard for this drawing. The final drawing is there on the actual page, but note all the rejects and false starts strewn around it. The one in the upper left corner is the very first version. I just couldn't get it to work, no matter what I did.

Also note that in all the versions on the left hand side, the monster has some kind of weird hollow tube on top of his head. My original idea was to have the evil cloud emanating from this tube. Why? I have no clue. It didn't make much sense even to me. In the end I came to my senses and replaced the tube with a horn and just had the cloud erupting from the general area of his brain.

That's today's tip: Don't be afraid to scrap something and start all over. If a drawing ain't working, maybe there's a reason.

Bigfoot Businessman

 

He came from the deep woods to the big city with a dream, to become Bigfoot Businessman, the Cryptozoological Capitalist!

This is a vector drawing, drawn all in InDesign. The logo was hand lettered, but based on a real font.

Here's the somewhat bizarre sketch I drew for Bigfoot Businessman. I'm not sure why I doodled him in two parts like that.

The Ninth Doctor

I'm a big fan of Doctor Who, so I thought I'd start a series of vector drawings of the eleven (!) different Doctors (so far).

Christopher Eccleston played the Ninth Doctor in 2005.

Sixteen years after the show was canceled, the BBC brought back a new and improved Doctor Who series in 2005. The new series has been going strong now for five seasons and is a huge hit in England, consistently receiving high ratings and generating tons of merchandise.

The SyFy Channel aired the first four seasons here in the States, but opted not to carry it after that. I guess they needed the precious air time for wrestling and shows about men pretending to see ghosts.

The new series finally has a budget that allows them to depict decent looking aliens and other planets. Don’t get me wrong, the old series had its charm, what with its cardboard sets and paper mache monsters, but it’s nice to see the show get the budget it deserves.

When the BBC first announced the show was coming back, fans wondered if the Doctor would be the same one from the old series, or if the show would be getting a reboot. After all, it would be tough to attract a new audience to a show with a 40+ year history, what with all that continuity and baggage.

In the end the producers decided not to go the reboot route, and #9 is the same Doctor we’ve known and loved for years.

The way they brought the series back was nothing short of genius, in my opinion. Since we last saw the Doctor in the TV movie in 1996, his home planet of Gallifrey has been destroyed under mysterious circumstances (which have since been partially explained) and the Doctor is now the Last Of The Time Lords, wandering time and space alone.

This very cleverly leveled the playing field for everyone. It provided a jumping on point for new viewers, and fans who knew the continuity inside and out didn't know any more about the Doctor's situation than new viewers. It was the perfect was to start the show up again.

Unlike the old series, which would stretch out a story over 4 or 6 half hour episodes, the new series features one story per hour long episode (with the occasional two parter).

I really liked Eccleston’s performance as the Doctor. He was moody, melancholy and guilt ridden (no doubt due to losing his home planet) and was obviously in need of someone like his new companion Rose Tyler to give his life meaning again. Too bad he only stuck around for one season (or “series” to the Brits).

This Doctor wasn't afraid to use force, often utilizing weapons of the era in which he found himself.

Unlike any previous incarnations, Doctor #9 spoke with a distinct Northern English accent. Rose Tyler asked the Doctor, "If you're an alien, why do you sound like you're from the North?" He replied, "Lots of planets have a North."

The Ninth Doctor’s costume was the simplest and most modern to date. In the past the various Doctors have all worn out-of-time faux Victorian era clothing; waistcoats, opera capes and scarves. This Doctor wore a plain t-shirt, pants and a leather jacket. For the first time he was actually wearing clothing that more or less fit the times. His costume remained unchanged during his series, with the exception of an occasional change of t-shirt color. Best of all, there were no question marks to be seen on his clothing (something that bothered me greatly about past Doctors)!

Much like the Eighth Doctor, the Ninth Doctor's Tardis interior was an impressively large steampunk kind of cavern, much more impressive than the original series' dinky interior. The Doctor mentioned more than once that the Tardis was not just a machine but alive, which was backed up by the incessant breathing sound in the background of the control room.

The Doctor's sonic screwdriver finally made its triumphant return in the new series, something we hadn't seen much since the Fifth Doctor's era.

The sonic screwdriver was originally just that-- a high tech tool that supposedly used sound to loosen screws and open locked doors. As time went on, the Doctor began relying more and more on it until the producers of the original series thought it was being used as a crutch, so they began to downplay it sometime during Doctor #5's era.

The sonic returned with a vengeance in the Ninth Doctor's adventures. It's now more versatile than ever, seemingly gaining new abilities every episode. No longer does it merely open locks, now it can be used to gain access to computers, reprogram cell phones so they can call into the past, even remotely control the Tardis. At times it seems more like magic than technology.

The Ninth Doctor was the first to use "psychic paper," a substance that would display whatever a subject thought he should see on it. If a guard would ask him for his pass, he'd show him the blank sheet of psychic paper, and the guard would see the appropriate credentials displayed on it, and allow the Doctor to pass. That would come in handy here in the real world.

Many important characters debuted in the Ninth Doctor's series, including his new companion Rose Tyler, her ex-boyfriend Mickey Smith, and former Time Agent and now immortal Captain Jack Harkness (who would go on to star in the Doctor Who spin-off Torchwood).

Several old foes returned to plague the Ninth Doctor, including the Autons (which were animated store mannequins) and his most famous nemesis, the Daleks.

The Ninth Doctor began the new series' tradition of utilizing the city of Cardiff, Wales, as a sort of home base. Many episodes of the new series have taken place in or around there. Coincidentally, the series is filmed at one of the BBC's studios in Cardiff. Imagine that!

Doctor #9 is a vector drawing, drawn all in InDesign.

It was tough trying to color his outfit. How do you color a jacket and pants that are both black without it looking like a solid blob? So I ended up having to cheat a bit and add some grays. Don't judge me! ;^)

Please forgive the ugly watermark on the illustration. I swore I would never add one to my art, because I know that 99.99% of my readers would never even think of stealing it. But earlier this year I had a run-in with an art thief who was not only stealing my work, but selling it as her own! Hence the watermarks. This is why we can't have nice things.

Stay tuned for Doctors #10 through #11! I'm almost done!

Here's the original sketch for the Ninth Doctor. This was probably one of the easiest likenesses I've done so far. I sketched him from memory, and then when I looked up reference photos, I decided trying to match the reality would just muddy things up. Doctor #9 usually looked pretty mopey, but I opted for one of his rare smiles here instead.

Luke Nukerson

I noticed that I tend to draw a lot of angry looking characters. If I was a psychiatrist I'd say that indicates I have some issues with the way the world's being run. Also if I was a psychiatrist I'd be charging $100 an hour.

Luke is a vector illustration, drawn all in InDesign.

I usually post my preliminary sketches (is that a redundant phrase?), but there weren't any this time. I just sort of sketched him out onscreen.

Fifty Gallon Hat

Bart was a man who knew a bargain when he saw it. Sure, he could have gone for an everyday ten gallon hat, but for just two dollars more he could get the fifty gallon size.

By the way, a ten gallon hat can only hold about three quarts of water. So how did it get that name? One theory is that Mexican vaqueros (or cowboys) wore hats with braids around them that they called tan galon, which meant "fancy hat." American cowboys misheard this phrase as "ten gallon" and the name stuck.

This was a fairly quick little vector drawing. I had a tough time with that frakin' hat though. Specifically the curved brim. It took a lot of attempts and finessing to draw a brim that was both ridiculously widened but still recognizable as a cowboy hat. The wispy clouds echoing the shape of the brim was a happy accident.

Originally the hat was even larger than it is here, but I found that the bigger I made the hat, the smaller the character had to become. I had to reduce the size of the hat somewhat for the cowboy to even be visible. I thought that having the hat break the boundaries of the background would make it seem bigger.

Drawn all in InDesign. A lot of people are surprised when they find out I draw in InDesign rather than Illustrator. InDesign has most (not all) of the same drawing tools as Illustrator, and it's easier to use, IMO.

The Count Takes Mr. Flappington Out For Walkies

Hey, it's another vector drawing!

This drawing kind of reminds me of when I was a kid. My dad would catch a junebug, tie a tread to one of its legs and hand it to me. The junebug would take off flying, and I'd walk around the yard holding onto its "leash." Take that, PETA!

I'm starting to like working in vector more and more. I didn't much like it the first time I dabbled in it, mostly because it took so incredibly long to draw anything. But the more I use vector, the faster I get. I did this one in about 3 hours or so. A far cry from the days it took to do this one in 2009.

The Count and the bat were drawn in InDesign. I then imported them into Photoshop where I added the painterly background (including splatters), because that's something you just can't do very well in vector.
Here's the original sketch of the Count. Note that originally he was going for a stroll in the sun, with an umbrella to prevent him from "sparkling" (call me old fashioned, but in my day vampires burst into flames when exposed to the sun). I decided that walking his bat would make a more interesting drawing.

Turk Lurkington

Turk just came home and noticed that his roommate disturbed his carefully arranged display of hand-crocheted tea towels.

Hey, it's another vector drawing!

I'm starting to like working in vector more and more. I didn't much like it the first time I dabbled in it, mostly because it took so incredibly long to draw anything. But the more I use vector, the faster I get. I did this one in about 3 hours or so. A far cry from the days it took to do this one in 2009.

Turk was drawn in InDesign. I imported him into Photoshop where I added the painterly background, because that's something you just can't do very well in vector.

I had a vague idea at best as to what color scheme to use for Turk, so I did this color test to help me decide on the best one to use. As you can see, I ended up going with the Turk at the upper right.
Turk went through a lot of changes from his preliminary sketch. This is the first sketch I did of him a few weeks ago. As you can see, it had a lot of problems, but there was something about it that made me want to try and make it work.

This is my second try at Turk. This one had a lot more energy and visual interest, so I went with it.