For those of you who are graphic designers or other heavy duty Adobe Creative Cloud users, this rant may strike a chord with you. I have used Adobe programs daily for my work since 1990. I used to love them. You buy the program, admittedly rather expensive, but you own it for until it’s no longer compatible with your computer. You upgrade as necessary to keep up with your clients’ work flow. You produce beautiful work with relative ease because you know and understand how the programs work.
Enter the Creative Cloud. At the beginning, things seemed to work fine, even if pricey. Adobe promises regular upgrades just by going to their cloud site and updating. No extra charge. But what good is it if every time you upgrade, it’s buggier than the last time. For the $85 dollars or so a month I pay for the CC programs and Adobe stock images, I would expect them to work as they should. It has become increasingly difficult to work in Indesign due to the fact that the spinning beach ball is a constant, having to force quit when it hangs and then it doesn’t actually quit, and then having to manually shut down and restart my laptop because it won’t start up unless I do.
I’ve done everything suggested to fix the problems, reinstalling several times, and even reverting to an older version. I absolute despise the whole suite at this point. I just want to be able to work and get things done on time, instead of having to make excuses to my clients. In all the 46+ years I’ve worked as a graphic designer, I’ve loved my work. Tonight, I’m angry that I have to continue working in retirement with such a miserable excuse for software as the Adobe Creative Cloud. I’m forced to pay for 21 apps I never use just to be able to have the ones I need. To rent them each separately costs a fortune, far more than buying the whole group together.
I Googled the kinds of issues I’m having. There is no shortage of other people having the same problems I’m having. So far, Adobe seems oblivious to the mess they’ve made of the formerly great programs we’ve come to know and love. It would be wonderful if they’d pay attention, get their heads out of the Cloud and stop trying to out-Adobe themselves with every release.