Spend your time working with the Adobe programs because you will find more and more depth in them as you go. You will get better and faster at them. Become a guru. Pick up other software/apps as needed. Never stop learning but don’t waste your time on things you’ll never actually use.
Adobe is probably the “industry standard” to some, but you need to look at what you want out of them. If it’s print, virtually every printer, both brick and mortar and online prefer a PDF as opposed to a native file. With that in mind, Affinity has programs that beat Adobe in both price and performance. Affinity Photo and Affinity Designer give Photoshop and Illustrator a kick in the pants. Plus, Affinity just released their Beta of Publisher which is comparable to InDesign and QuarkXpress (amongst others). Tools are a means to an end and for some, price is important. QuarkXpress and the Affinity line are subscription free. While some will point out the Adobe subscription allows you access to all of their software, be aware that over the years Adobe has acquired many programs and either sat on them or killed them off (Fireworks, Flash, PageMill, Muse, etc.). As far as web goes, the sky’s the limit as web standards are constantly evolving and refining. Best to try as many free trial periods from the various developers and manufacturers.
I really do wish that were the case, but it’s not — at least yet.
Most large format or specialty printers still prefer native files since they so often need to work with them a bit for their specialized equipment and processes. When all they get is a PDF, this sort of tweaking is a problem. Most offset printers or quick-print digital shops will accept PDFs with no hesitation (most even prefer them), but it really does depend.
As for Affinity, I have hight hopes that they will kick Adobe’s butt, but none of their apps meant to compete with Illustrator, Photoshop or, more recently, InDesign are quite there yet. At the speed they’ve been improving their offerings, I wouldn’t be surprised if they get there soon (got my fingers crossed). On the other hand, for hobbyists, amateurs and those not really needing all the bells, whistles and pro-level features and expectations of the CS apps, yeah, the Affinity suite is a very viable option.
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Before Steve jobs died I had dreams of apple swooping in with ps and ai killers… Affinity still has a very long road ahead to even compete imo.
Now I would just be happy if Adobe finally provided error free dual monitor usage.
You can use different tools like:
-Paint 3d
-Pixlr
-SketchUp
-Blender
-Piktochart
These are the tools which can be use as alternative of adobe suite.
Glad you resurrected this thread but maybe Ballardstudio is right - this needs its own thread.
Mid Boomer here, Born in '59
By the time the Mac came out I had been in print for around 4 years. I learned to type using Wordstar on an early PC.
Before the Office suite there was Jazz on the Mac - word processor, drawing app and spreadsheet app as a bundle. I fooled around with MacDraw and Mac Paint when they came out. Superpaint introduced colour. At this stage it was all still 8 bit.
Quark / PageMaker / Illustrator changed the game. It was Illustrator '88 that came with the free T-shirt - I still have mine somewhere. Postscript quickly became the industry standard and that grew Adobe to the monster we have today.
I don’t mean to be rude, but… It’s not industry standard to “some”. It IS industry standard. Now, if you’d have said Adobe is overpriced, buggy, and imperfect I’d be right there with you. In Design is one of the worst pieces of software ever invented imo. But remember, QuarkXpress was industry standard once too.
As of TODAY: Presses are most commonly set up (to varying degrees) to be most efficiently utilized with Adobe products (because 99% of their business comes to them in those formats). So you have to take that cost benefit into account. They’ve already worked the bugs out. So the print goes smooth.
But anything that slows down a press is directly proportional to the extra charges applied. If the pressman has to go outside of his normal routine to produce the file, you will get charged. Press charges ARE THE HIGHEST CHARGES in the print business because you have just stopped a machine that should be running 23 hours/day. Every other job either has to wait or the entire job has to be skipped and rebooked for press-time.
So let’s say you’re saving around $500/year by not using Adobe software.
Make sure the printer knows PRIOR to sending files what program you are using. Doing so limits “down time” on the press and gives them the opportunity to pre-press your files. If not, you will be paying 1. for the extra work that “might” need to be done, and 2. for the company’s losses while that machine is down.
One big job can EASILY be $500 if you have to “stop the presses”.
With any luck the industry will shift. For example the genius who invented CERM software (which is amazing for huge companies but completely unwieldy and hard to learn) sold CERM and made a new, simpler version (Hybrid Software) because he saw his own creation become a Frankenstein’s monster.
If you read a print vendor specs, you’ll see a lot of them won’t take some of the off color softwares at all. I have one vendor that won’t touch Corel files at all. Send em as a tif or forget it. And the problem with PDFs made in programs outside of Adobe is they all use slightly different output engines, any of which can introduce bugs into an Adobe pdf workflow. Quark’s PDF engine used to be notorious for this (but I haven’t seen a Quark file now in over 4 years…until tomorrow, probably.) Quark is still considered an industry standard though.
Not only PDF issues but color issues. Some of those otherwares don’t support CMYK, or they don’t support pantone, color profiles are non-standard, or their transparency features don’t play well with output rips.
Yes, this all costs money. But more likely than not, you would submit a PDF and get what you get. A print vendor is not going to add your software of choice just to output your files.
We don’t take a machine off line to set up your files. Your files don’t run until someone in tech figures out how to make them fit the workflow for the machine.
Plan accordingly.
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I’m assuming for publications (text heavy art)?
Great addition.
All of this = time = $ out of the designers pocket.
You betcha.
You want to use toys to do professional work, you pay the price.
As far as Quark goes, they shot themselves in the foot when InDesign CS1 first hit the market. Quark had a limited artboard size of 48" square. It wasn’t until WAY too late that they fixed that. The last version I used was 7 and it still had the small artboard. Designers multitasking in the advertising world didn’t need the hassle of trying to design in scale all the time and getting weird results on output. There is a lot of legacy art out there but the newspaper industry is dying a slow death and they were pretty much the main holdout for Quark.
Another big issue for Quark was they were late to the market for software that ran on OSX …I think that could have helped them on the Mac Side of things. So, when Adobe came along and provided InDesign as a native OSX program that helped.
I know where I worked at the time we were heavy Quark users and never thought about switching until Quark dragged their feet on OSX.
I don’t remember a crossover issue with OSX. At that time though I probably had 4 macs in the office. One of them was a dual boot. We had the dually for a very long time after OSX came out. I still have one at home.
They also had terrible updating and pricing policies.
@PrintDriver I found this old forum post showing that QuarkXpress 5 only ran on OSX under “classic” but running it under classic (sort of “emulated” essentially) was “buggy” and it was odd that it wasn’t a native OSX program from the start,
And here is more here on the non native support issue.
According to wiki, “nDesign 2.0 was released January 2002 (just days before QuarkXPress 5). First version to support Mac OS X.”
It wasn’t until (I believe) middle of 2003 that Quark released a native OSX version. I cant find an exact release date on the internet. That may not sound like much, but this article explains the hassles of trying to run Quark in Classic mode.
In that year and a half people were too comfortable and happy to have InDesign that was better integrated with Illustrator and PhotoShop.
The folks in my corner of the industry also weren’t using Quark in depth, the way it was meant to be used as a publishing software. Probably didn’t notice any more bugs than used to dealing with Adobewares. I think Q5 was when they finally introduced the radio button that told the damn thing to send ALL the image data to the rip rather than just the size Q thought the image was supposed to be (ignoring the scaling factor being applied to it’s itty bitty artboard.) Q4 was the most stable piece of software I have ever used, after maybe Classic OS8.
I certainly preferred Quark files to Corel files back then. And Illustrator had, and still has, problems with large image placement. Don’t get me started on Pagemaker. There weren’t a lot of layout options back then. 
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Sketch is best.
Adobe CC is the industry standard, in my opinion it’s too versatile to be overlooked. There are a couple of programs you could look into Affinity has a range of products that cost only a fraction of what Adobe asks 
Yeah, except none of them were actually doctors lol.