A quarter century or so after desktop publishing revolutionised pre-press, Adobe had an excellent suite of creative and productive programs for print bundled together as the Creative Suite (now called Creative Cloud), with InDesign (multi-page layout), Illustrator (detailed vector design and layout, Photoshop (image editing) and Acrobat (PDF utility).
Combined with buying out competitors, it had cornered the market almost completely, but by the 2010s it was finding it ever harder to find new users or to get existing ones to pay for regular upgrades that delivered little new.
Unlike hot metal typesetters, software never wears out. How could Adobe keep revenues flowing and shareholders happy?
Subscription, the double-edged sword
The answer, as realised by Adobe and other software suppliers with near-monopolies, was to switch to ‘subscriptions’. If you want to carry on using Creative Cloud, you have to pay, by the month or year. This guarantees enormous incomes for Adobe, but it also carries the danger of removing the incentive to innovate.
For most professional design and print users, a subscription of just under £50 per user per month (and less for site licenses) for 20-plus apps is very affordable, even if they don’t need all the video and web programs supplied as well – as long as they don’t think too hard about how much it adds up to over five or 10 years.
Any design agency, any printer will have at least one licence for Creative Cloud so it can deal with customer files. Even companies that use one of the Creative Cloud competitors will usually have a licence “just in case”.
This has its advantages – users will all have the same, most up-to-date version and there’s a huge pool of experienced operators worldwide. Most customers will supply Adobe-originated files, and all printers will be able to accept them.
Development slowdown
InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop are all top-flight programs and you can’t really say that any of the competitors can beat them on significant features. They output all the flavours of PDF up to PDF/X-4 but not PDF 2.0 or X-6. There are also extensive stock image and font libraries available to subscribers.
Really, it’s hard to complain about Creative Cloud, except for the way that the monthly subs add up over the years while, certainly for print-relevant applications, the introduction of new features has slowed right down.
Admittedly some of the most necessary updates tend to be the most boring – keeping up with changes in operating systems, especially for Macintosh users. Like its competitors, Creative Cloud can run on the very fast and efficient Apple Silicon hardware in the latest Macs.
Even so, Adobe’s concentration seems to be given over to ever more finely sliced iterations of web or video applications with no print relevance. For instance the latest Photoshop 23.2 introduced in February just tweaked one of the effects filters, updated the camera and lens imports for Bridge, and added support for a new file format.
InDesign during 2020 and 2021 mainly gained tweaks to the user interface. A new intelligent text wrap that detects the main subject in images is clever, though the previous manual method wasn’t difficult.
Illustrator in 2022 is gaining some simple 3D tools, apparently mostly of the type/shape extrusion type, plus revolves and inflates, and it can also map graphics onto more complex models imported from Substance, Adobe’s 3D artwork tool suite (that costs £40.45 per month extra on top of Creative Cloud). We haven’t had a chance to try it yet, but it could have some relevance in packaging design.
Meanwhile some things are being taken out with apparently no user consultation, for instance the basic 3D abilities of Photoshop, which admittedly hardly anyone used, or more seriously, the built-in Pantone libraries, which we’ve covered previously in Printweek.
Alternatives to Adobe
Despite Adobe’s dominance, there’s still a decent number of alternatives, some dating back to the same time in the mid-1980s when desktop publishing was new and exciting.
QuarkXPress is one of them. Still very much a contender technically as a professional layout program for print, it can match InDesign pretty well feature-for-feature. Since 2018 it has been able to import and convert InDesign IDML document files. Pantone libraries are still built in.
Quark has been taken over a few times in its four decades (it was founded in 1981 though XPress dates to 1987), most recently in 2017. The new owner, Parallax Capital Partners, said it wanted to concentrate on the enterprise content manager (Quark Publishing Platform).
However it has carried on developing XPress with yearly updates, most recently in February with v.18, called QuarkXPress 2022. This introduces a content library, compressed PDFs and the ability to use familiar InDesign shortcuts.
It also shook up the business model, controversially offering a £517 perpetual license in 2017 that is only updated if a £221 annual ‘Business Advantage Plan’ is paid for. A more attractive alternative introduced for 2022 is a £184 per year subscription, working out as £15.33 per month including support and updates.
Corel is another company dating back to the 1980s that has a loyal user base for its core product CorelDraw, a multi-page page layout and vector graphics program that combines the functionality of InDesign and Illustrator; plus the Photo-Paint image editor. These are supplied together as the CorelDraw Graphics Suite, the latest version of which was announced in March. This includes access to a very wide range of fonts and clipart (both raster and vector) that appeal to some markets. CorelDraw remains popular in signage and vehicle wrap print circles because of this.
Corel has had an on-off relationship with MacOS, at times only offering Windows products, but the introduction of all-new Mac code in 2019 went down well and this is updated in line with the Windows version. The new Apple Silicon Macs have been supported since 2021.
The latest 2022 version of CorelDraw Graphics Suite offers both Mac and Windows licences for the same payment. It’s currently only available on subscription, for £319 per year (incl VAT). There’s a perpetual license version for £659, but this is the older 2021 version.
Since 2020 there have been collaborative features that fit in with working from home. 2022 sees more personalisation, for workspaces as well as learning materials. Cloud-based personal asset management is extended in 2022.
New features for 2022 in CorelDraw include the ability to preview spreads plus front and back pages; different-sized items can be held in the same files, such as poster, roll-up banners and A4 pages; input and editing of multi-page PDFs; and EPS file output.
Serif Software is all British and was originally a developer of a low-cost layout program called PagePlus. This sold well but wasn’t really intended for professional print. The introduction of app stores for easy distribution coincided with the creation of the Affinity suite of all-new, graphics programs using up to date coding and available for Windows or MacOS, including Apple Silicon Macs.
The first two, Affinity Photo and Design, are equivalent to Photoshop and Illustrator. They don’t quite match Adobe’s full feature sets, but they are certainly good enough for professional use and their prices of £39.99 plus VAT each for perpetual licenses are very attractive. This includes regular updates that have been free to date.
In 2019 Serif launched Affinity Publisher, its layout program to compete with InDesign. Again it does most things you’d need for just £39.99, including regular updates that have also been free. The StudioLink feature lets you access the editing tools of Photo or Designer while working on a layout, with “round tripping” of image files.
“We’re seeing increasing numbers of customers working in professional layout, such as magazines and newspapers,” says John Atkin, Serif’s head of PR. “We’re also making good inroads into volume licensing in sectors including education, architecture and automotive, and they’ll remain key areas of growth for us.”
Publisher can open and edit InDesign IDML files as well as PDFs, and it outputs up to PDF/X-4. It still has a built-in Pantone library.
What else is needed?
Essentially, Adobe Creative Cloud does everything any designer or printer could want. A source close to Adobe suggests that the company has lost interest in print, which it would doubtless deny, but certainly nothing as game-changing as InDesign or PDF has been seen for two decades.
There are good reasons, such as cost, to choose one of its competitors, but none offer anything significantly different.
So to conclude, here’s a personal Simon Eccles list of things that any of the design-for-print developers could add, but for whatever reason are choosing not to.
- Support for variable data beyond the basic mail merges offered today. Live links to databases, with previewing and export to PDF/VT or PDF/VTR, or IPDS and AFP if feasible
- Implementing PDF2.0 and PDF/X-6, which has improvements over X-4 for multi-part jobs on different substrates
- Fully editable PDF imports
- Easy to use CxF-based standardised colour communication without Pantone
- Basic 3D and rendering to preview print embellishment such as foils and spot gloss – this could be a separately paid-for Cloud service
- Cloud-based access for occasional users, to compete with or complement the new breed of online design services such as Canva
If any readers have more ideas, please let us know by leaving a comment below.
