nottylerdurden

As one of the people that came up with a technology that makes my job possible, I appreciate his numerous contributions to my industry.
Rest in Peace.

If you're not earning enough money to afford $600 a year for your software you are a hobbyist. I wish people would stop complaining about how much the subscription is. Seriously, have you ever looked at what software in other industries costs? My accountant pays $5K a year for their software. The software used by architecture and engineering professionals is ridiculously expensive.

Try doing work for a major client and then handing them one of these hobby program files. Or going to the printer and having a discussion about how your PDF traps black, knocks out or overprints when your files don't output correctly or worse yet when it's discovered on press. It will cost way more than $600 to replate the job.

These programs might be fine in their own right and certainly are acceptable for the person trying to create flyers for their band. Trying to work as a subcontractor to an ad agency or design studio somewhere and using these would be like showing up on a construction job site with your Harbor Freight tools.

If you're going to show up to the job, show up with the right tools. Just my 2 cents and 30 years of design experience talking there.

These are all good and fine for people whose hobby is drawing and don't want to be tied to a subscription. But most professional designers are not an island. The job doesn't always start and stop with them. It gets handed off to other professionals. Working with the industry standard Adobe suite saves time and headaches. When you're up against a deadline you don't want a call from the printer or the next person in the chain saying "the client wants to make a change, what program did you do this in?" Many of the design studios I do work for, require that you use Adobe products so that they can edit my files down the road. While alternatives are good and help keep Adobe on its toes there is a definite advantage to using the industry standard in a production situation.

leeatmg said:

Could that work in reverse, allowing an iPad Pro to be used as an external display for a Mac (or even another iPad Pro?)

If you want to do that, there is already an App that lets you. I've used my 12.9 as an external wired monitor to my Macbook Pro for years. Check out "duet" in the App Store.

The problem is most creative types tend to be very bad business people, who's fault is that, of course the government and they need to level the playing field for people who have no interest in become business savvy. Some of the best creative types who are very successful are also very good business people, they learn what they needed to do to get ahead. So it not like understanding business is a highly specialize skill.

Your grasp of creativity is only equaled by your grasp of business.