On Monday I’m going to buy Adobe’s CS5.5 Master Collection. I keep teasing myself about the insanity of taking no profit for personal use so that I can send a big company serious money for software for which there are make-do Open Source alternatives. It’s not that I think Open Source should be free, as in “free lunch.” It’s more that I’d like free, as in “free speech,” to have lower financial barriers for participation, because creativity is a basic human need. We should not have to pay big bucks to express ourselves. If software is a creative tool, I want to use software that I can get into with sweat equity.
Let her Rip
In my non-virtual life I am a strong believer in hands-on art. I want pigment applied with my own hands, on paper I can texturize, tear, collage and stain with my very own fingerprints. I’ve resisted digital arts because I believe the hands-on stuff has a deeper value. I want fine art.
I resent the copied, impersonal patterns that are everywhere in graphic design, yet every day I check in with a Social Media community where my dashboard is decked out with patterns borrowed from design programs. My fingerprints seem to be there because I picked out the patterns, but it’s a surface thing in comparison to what real art can do. This is common. This is the way it is today and the way it will be more and more.
Resistance is Futile… and Fertile
It’s the same old story, “You will be assimilated. Your biological and technological distinctiveness will be added to our own. Resistance is futile.”
The Industrial Revolution that gave us mass production and therefore more affordable household goods also gave us less individuality, fewer opportunities and necessities for personalization. We have more stuff and in some cases better stuff, but it is also more likely to be the same stuff everyone else has, less likely to be made with our own hands or the hands of someone we value. Even Twitter’s first website was designed around what was basically non-unique clip art – check out this Washington Post interview of graphic artist, Simon Oxley:
I joined the iStock community back in 2004, and began pumping images into the flow a year or so later — at first I was hesitant to join in the stock trade, since the image I had of stock was a little negative, believing that it motivated designers to only create gray, generic images. I soon realized that like many things in life, it is only gray and boring if you make it that way. … and there is enough space for many people to express as many emotions as they wish. iStock provides a channel for creative minds to broadcast their thoughts through and discuss the technical aspects of imagemaking, which ultimately frees people up to make whatever they wish.
Rebirth
Where am I going with all this and what does it have to do with Adobe? At 51, I’ve had a change of life in more ways than one. I want the industry standard tools
Still, Adobe is expensive. I keep looking in the mirror and saying, “You’re nuts. You know that, don’t you?”
The grin remains. I like this nuts.