I actually quit you Adobe

That’s right. Actually quit. I summed up the balls of the design ages and nailed my thesis to the cathedral door and all of that. I even went so far as to uninstall all of it. Well on one machine at any rate. Adobe, I’ve quit you.
I’m still scared though. And this is sad. I’m aware of that.

The fact of the matter is that in my old age I’ve taken to thinking about design in all sorts of high falutin’ ways that didn’t much matter before. When you’re young(er), going to obviously live forever, drunk and partying a lot and full of optimism with a horizon of mainly imagined opportunity, you don’t think about the politics of how you do things. However, recently I have.

It started with first deciding to not have any of my kids on Facebook because I didn’t like the fact that a massive Internet company owns the images. Then it was more or less quitting Facebook altogether. Then I realised after using Sketch for a while and having to open Illustrator that not only are Adobe’s interfaces anyeurism-inducing monuments to bloat and legacy software, but that one company had not just a global monopoly but an absolute chokehold on using a computer to create images. This flat out drove me old man, armchair yelling at the TV mad. So I quit. Going indie and all that. And we’ll see how far I get, but its sadly exciting.

It’s also been a semi contrived exercise in creating constraints for my work. If I can’t do it in Sketch, well, I guess I just won’t do it – and if I can’t find an example of it in Motion instead of After Effects, well, then I’ll just have to actually work a little bit harder and be a proper designer about things. And that’s that.