My escape from the evil kingdom

I may be an old dog but I’m constantly learning new tricks, a victim of accumulated experience, acquired by simply living. I’ve already written about my early days with one of the first Macintosh computers (when nobody creative had anything more than an electric typewriter on their desk). In 1986, I took a new job at a women-run design firm working for what used to be called “high-tech” clients. Our offices were in not-quite-hip-yet East Cambridge and we rubbed shoulders with folks like Dan Bricklin (VisiCalc), Esther Dyson and others from places like Bitstream, Lotus, MOTU, Harvard and M.I.T. We worshipped at the shrines of design royalty like Muriel Cooper, Edward Tufte and Matthew Carter. The U.S. Treasury department even phoned us once to ask us about how they could make money harder to counterfeit by using visual literacy strategies. It was a brief and glorious moment in time when Massachusets was as up-and-coming as Silicon Valley and we felt like salmon successfully leaping upstream to the spawning grounds of a new world.

I was still using my trusty Macintosh (512k of RAM), along with a very expensive ($5,000 USD), early Apple LaserWriter, financed by my Mom and paid off in installments. But I mostly used it to write copy, presentations and business proposals. Our office was still PC and Microsoft-dependent and our Macs were expensive personal indulgences still awaiting the magical software that would later make them indispensable.

In addition to the usual marketing material, logos, packaging, etc., our company designed and edited a great deal of computer software documentation – information design was our claim to fame. We popped floppy disks into our PCs (sometimes with a little prayer), and via the CLI (command line interface), created and edited our lengthy documents. We worked in Microsoft Word and wrote complex, painstaking stylesheets that we manually applied to every page. Drafts were output to a dot-matrix printer that often ran all day long. The final, digital master was handed over to the printer on a floppy disk. It was a long, slow process, and excruciating at times, when stylesheets became corrupted or errors were made that messed up pagination and indexing.

One day, we welcomed a visitor from Seattle, a soft-spoken man named Paul Brainerd. He was there to demonstrate the latest software from his company, Aldus. It was an application that would enable users to create page layouts via a graphical user interface (GUI), a term that was then brand-spanking new. The demonstration was to take place in my office. He set his Macintosh on my desk and I perched on the corner to watch. He inserted a 3.5” floppy disc (the kind that came in a stiff, plastic case) and it took a minute or two to open the app, which was then called Aldus Pagemaker. We were amazed to see that we could move text and images around on our screens, much like we did on our old-fashioned drawing boards. Text could be instantly resized and reformatted. Typefaces, weights, line-spacing and kerning could be altered at will. Colors could be applied and changed. No X-Acto knife was required. And the screen could grow and shrink to allow close inspection of details and a broad overview of the entire page. It was a game-changer, the very beginning of desktop publishing, a term coined by Mr. Brainerd. The next day, it was painful to return to DOS-flavored page design.

Aldus went on to make a Windows version of Pagemaker and to create a few more apps, as well as inventing the TIFF image format. When Quark XPress came onto the scene, I had recently moved from Vermont to Québec and I was forced to buy it to make printers in my new home happy, but I hated that buggy app with a rare passion. Here, printers dictated the tools, not us lowly designers, never mind that we were the ones creating the stuff they were hired (and paid handsomely) to print.

A few years later, Aldus was purchased by Adobe Systems for $446 million and Aldus Pagemaker became Adobe Pagemaker. Adobe then went on to invent the PostScript page description language, enabling accurate digital-to-print, and to produce Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign and a host of other publishing-oriented apps. Because I had been a loyal Pagemaker user, I made the switch when Pagemaker reached end-of-life, paying an exorbitant amount for the new, Adobe-ized version of the software (originally around $800).

In the good old days, I loved Adobe Photoshop and used it faithfully from its debut in 1990 until Adobe’s invention of online registration verification, just the beginning of a horrific departure from users owning the software they had purchased. As a professional designer, animator and illustrator, I bought expensive packages from both Adobe and Macromedia (purchased by Adobe in a $3.4 billion-dollar stock deal in 2005). After (eventually) having spent thousands of dollars on Premiere, Flash, and the full desktop publishing suite, I discovered that I couldn’t put Premiere on my video editing workstation and InDesign on my laptop as this wasn’t permitted by their licensing schema. Because I worked from home in a rural location with bare-minimum internet connectivity, I also couldn’t regularly “verify” my ownership, done via an Internet connection and spyware software on my Mac. It was the beginning of my disillusionment with Adobe.

When I called support to find out why I couldn’t “activate” my license for a single app that lived only on my second computer, I was put on eternal hold until I was helped by someone who was definitely not speaking to me from anywhere nearby, and appeared to be reading a book during the entire time they “assisted” me. In the end, they informed me that I couldn’t separate the package (which I had paid something like $1500 USD for this time around). Back then, the whole package, shipped via FedEx, weighing in at approximately 10 pounds as it contained the apps on CDs and a hefty stack of manuals. Frustrated, and as someone who has never pirated software and strongly disapproved of those who did, I finally had no choice but to resort to an illegally obtained registration number in order to use the application I had paid top dollar for. This left a really bad taste in my mouth.

When Adobe then decided – pretty much overnight – to charge an obscenely expensive subscription fee for any and all apps that I already owned and that were still compatible with my operating system, I couldn’t believe it. It just seemed like a big f__k you to their loyal (and captive) user base. Back then, there was no other option, they were the only game in town, and they were telling us in no certain terms to bend over.

Finally, in 2014, UK company Serif Europe Ltd. launched Affinity Designer, to be followed by Affinity Photo and Affinity Publisher, a complete suite of products that could (hopefully) replace Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop and InDesign. When Affinity Photo appeared in 2015, I quickly went over to the “dark” side. As someone who had used Adobe products from quite literally their day one, I was pretty much the poster child for not being likely to switch, but to my own amazement (we all know how hard switching apps can be), it was literally an overnight change for me. I purchased each new (then beta) Affinity app as they were released (with nary a subscription model to be found) and it took me about a week for my Adobe life to fade into a distant bad dream.

One of the greatest things about Affinity products is that from the get-go, they work seamlessly together, unlike Adobe’s patched, unpredictable, and poorly supported apps that had gotten slower and buggier over time. With Affinity, if I was using the Publisher app and needed to edit a photo that I had placed in my layout, I could simply click on the “Photo” persona icon and Publisher morphed temporarily into Affinitiy Photo. This feature is a fabulous function in all three apps (you need to own all three for it to work) and saves so much time. While at first there wasn’t a lot of documentation out there (and I was beta-testing everything to begin with), it didn’t take long for tutorials and forum threads to appear. Bye-bye Adobe and good riddance! And amazingly, at the time of my purchase, the entire suite cost a mere $205 CAD for a perpetual license!

Affinity arrived not a moment too soon, as in 2021, Adobe went on to purchase video collaboration platform Frame.io (for $1.2 billion) and in 2022, attempted to purchase Figma for $20 billion. Thankfully, the Figma purchase failed due to antitrust/monopoly-tinted issues. It also sparked a great deal of user outrage. Affinity’s parent company, Serif (created in 1987) was acquired in 1996 by a US company but was sold back in 2001. In 2024, Serif was acquired by popular Australian company Canva, which at first terrified me, but they promised that their strategy would be to continue the perpetual licensing model, which has thus far remained the case.

But wait…

Adobe is really hard to leave 100% behind. The company invented the Portable Document Format (PDF) which is licensed to many other companies, including Apple, who use it in their native Preview app. Adobe has apparently made many, many deals that establish their app as the unique option for submitting forms – especially on government sites. Recently, this has become problematic, as all popular web browsers remove support for insecure, fillable PDF forms (usually via a plugin). If you want to fill out and sign this type of PDF form, you must download the “free” Adobe Reader (more on that in a minute). And you need the latest version or it just won’t work. If you’re on a Mac and you attempt to open one of these forms with Apple’s Preview app or in your browser, you’ll be greeted by a friendly “This document can’t be opened”. Nope, not by anything but an Adobe app – not even one that licenses Adobe’s PDF technology.

I recently worked to help a young person in an African refugee camp to come to Canada as part of a collective immigrant program. They were accepted by the program and the next step was to complete a standard Canadian application for residence. This involved filling out a lot of forms on a government site. These forms can only be opened in Adobe Reader. I was unable to complete the forms online due to the aforementioned browser security bans, even though the page itself suggested that this was the way to do it. Upon downloading multiple forms to fill them out on my laptop, I discovered that I needed to update my version of Adobe Reader in order to interact with them. A visit to the download link led me to a page that insisted I needed to create or log into an Adobe account. I figured that this was due to my already having had an Adobe account at some point, which was apparently detected when I loaded the page. As I proceeded to log in to my old account, at every load of a page, I was bombarded with upsell pitches for Adobe products. I finally succeeded in downloading and installing the newest version of the app, which resulted in countless Adobe files being added (to those apparently already on) my Mac, many of them hidden. I then realized, via pop-up notifications and a look at my Mac’s Activity monitor, that Adobe was connecting to the internet every time I turned on my Mac, loading helper apps at login, and showering me with pop-ups as I opened and filled out the government forms locally on my computer. These pop-up pitches were written in such a way as to make me believe that I couldn’t complete the form without paying for a subscription, which was untrue and misleading. I am sure Adobe gets plenty of folks to pay up before realizing they didn’t really have to. I’m also willing to bet that whoever is sold into integrating Adobe form systems at corporate and government levels is clueless as to what this entails for end-users. You could die before succeeding in getting technical help on many a government-related website. I found this out the hard way when the form I was filling out did not include my town on its dropdown list of Canadian towns (required in order to submit the form). I suppose this is one way to quickly reduce the number of applications.

If you have ever tried to uninstall an Adobe product, it is not for the faint of heart. As a recent response via a popular AI chatbot said “Uninstalling old Adobe software can be more complex than simply dragging the application to the trash”. No shit. I’ve personally experienced every painful way that this has been done since the very beginning of Adobe software. In order to uninstall you must first install more Adobe software and then go through a thoroughly confusing process of activating, deactivating and uninstalling packages via the company’s Uninstaller app and/or Creative Cloud (if you are a subscriber).

I may have gotten a bit off track, but the moral of the story is that you’re unlikely to regret making the switch from Adobe to Affinity.

Update : In fall of 2025, Affinity announced that their applications would be free from then on. I’m not sure what to think about this after having paid (not much) for three licenses… I only hope this isn’t going to develop into paying for specific “features” in future versions. So far, the news has been good, but my fingers are still crossed.

References

• Paul Brainerd - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Paul_Brainerd
• Aldus Corporation - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aldus_Corporation
• Adobe Systems - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adobe_Inc
• Affinity - https://affinity.serif.com/
• Serif Europe Ltd - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serif_Europe