sign and design software

[Bobby H]

It's only an 'industry standard' because Adobe gives their stuff to school, students use because there is no choice, use Adobe or use nothing.

Many colleges and career techs teach courses on Adobe apps like Illustrator, InDesign, etc because employers are wanting proficiency in those applications from would-be hires more often than other creative applications. Adobe doesn't have any kind of thing they hang over schools saying you have to use and teach our software exclusively. Other software companies provide free software to schools too; it isn't just Adobe.

I see the notion of Adobe being industry standard in the kinds of art files I receive from clients. The stuff from big companies is almost always Adobe-flavored. The same goes for assets from ad agencies. The stuff from small businesses and individuals is getting to be Canva-flavored more often (unfortunately). The only people sending me CorelDRAW CDR files are typically people from other sign companies. I might get CDR files from someone at a t-shirt/embroidery shop once in a while. Despite all the buzz about Affinity Designer I've yet to receive .afdesign files from any customers. If the user base for Affinity Designer is growing it must be with people who are creating their own personal artwork rather than doing so for business.

 

[unclebun]

The real reason Adobe is considered the graphics industry standard is not because of Adobe. It's because of Apple. Back in the dark old days of computing the Apple Mac became capable of handling graphics manipulation before the Windows computers could. So it became considered necessary to use a Mac to do graphics. And even when Windows computers became capable of doing graphics, the ports of Adobe programs to the PC were terrible and slow. During that time period (early to mid 90s) signmakers generally couldn't use Macs because the signmaking equipment (once we got past the Gerber IV-B) only worked with PCs. So signmakers used graphics programs like Sign Wizard and Flexi and CASmate and so on which were designed for Windows and ran quickly on it, and dealt with vectors for cutting vinyl, which is what we were doing. The advertising and graphic design and print world, however, continued using Macs even though PCs were becoming more powerful. So they just stuck with Photoshop and Illustrator. And since schools from top to bottom were using Macs to teach students that's what they got used to. Signshops stuck with PCs because we're cheaper people generally and we need them to run the equipment. Now that printing has generally taken over the sign industry you see younger sign guys who do everything in Photoshop and Illustrator. And you see a lot of signs that have layout and design that would be OK in a magazine or on a computer screen but don't really work so well on a sign. And every kind of sign is now called a wrap.

 

[Bobby H]

Adobe deserves as much credit for revolutionizing computer-based print graphics work as Apple, if not more so. Adobe invented Postscript. The page description technology as well as Postscript-based fonts were critical elements in the so-called desktop publishing revolution. Apple happened to have the only practical computing platform to host these developments in the mid-late 1980's. Of course the first three releases of Adobe Illustrator (1.0, 1.1 and 88) were exclusive to the Mac OS. Photoshop was initially exclusive to the Mac platform; Photoshop didn't become available for Windows until version 2.5 in 1992.