Having paid cancellation fees after being extremely careful making subscription for specific products so as to avoid the same, I am never going to touch Adobe or it's products anymore. Affinity solves all our problems.
> Arial — A universal favorite for presentations and business documents
Because it used to* be available out of the box, everywhere. Not because it’s such a great typeface. I can’t imagine the sequence of short-sighted enterprise design decisions that puts someone in a position where they have to use Arial through Adobe Fonts.
* I guess that’s no longer true because of Android?
On the one hand, if you're editing a graphics file for a client that already uses Arial, you need Arial. Full stop. It doesn't matter if it's great or not.
On the other hand, Arial is pre-installed not just on Windows, but Macs and iOS. And Adobe doesn't make e.g. Illustrator for Android or Linux.
So what Creative Cloud app runs on an OS that doesn't already have Arial? What am I missing? Do they have something that runs on Android?
I don’t know enough about Adobe Fonts and don’t trust their own writing about it, but it seems like it supports web. So I suppose it might be a way to get a consistently poor typographic experience on all platforms.
Oh, that would make sense, as a webfont for Linux and Android.
Still, Arial isn't poor. It's nearly Helvetica. It's a knockoff, but all it does is simplify some letterforms. It's not like it destroys the spacing or balance or weight or anything. You're talking as if it were Comic Sans...
Any typeface must be judged in two ways - the raw quality of the letter shapes, proportions, spacing, etc - and the baggage of associations it provokes. In both respects, Arial makes a design look cheap.
Most people couldn't tell the difference between Helvetica and Arial at all. And Helvetica is one of the most iconic, classic, respected designs out there.
The only people it might look cheap to are graphic designers. So who cares?
Yes, if you can't tell the difference and don't care, use it! That's exactly the circumstance where it's used, and the reason it is associated with cheapness.
People do use it. So stop complaining about it. It isn't associated with cheapness except in the minds of a tiny percentage of people like you.
I mean, like you admitted, it's not even a question of aesthetic qualities like the balance of letterforms. You really care about the extra-aesthetic connotations of whether the leg of an uppercase R is straight or squiggly? There are more important things in life. And I say this as someone who cares quite a lot about typography.
Like, sure, Palatino and Optima have strong associations with certain decades that even people who don't follow typography feel subconciously. But Helvetica vs. Arial? C'mon, I don't think so.
Talking about web and small busines: probably true.
For lager company it was never really an option, because it was only licence free on windows. So no IBM ASF, iText on Solaris or other huge non-windows text renderer used arial even if they don't use a corporate design font
Yes, Arial is hot garbage. It’s a Microsoft-sponsored rebadge of Helvetica, made because Microsoft didn’t want to license an actual good type face.
This is like calling beige office walls a “universal favorite.” And I bet people at Adobe today are still confused by their poor reception on Bluesky. They lost the ability to talk to their customers years ago. They only have prisoners now.
It's amazing to me when wildly successful companies have a great thing going and choose to try to squeeze customers instead of giving them reasons to be loyal, and then self-destruct.
Adobe and Unity both come to mind.
I don't think I've seen a brand increase margins at the cost of customer satisfaction, successfully.
They're maxed out on customers so about the only things they can do are increase prices or make cuts. It's always just so they can bump up their quarterly reports. Only private companies risk doing anything decent any more because they're not tied to investors' whims.
This seems like a common misunderstanding. Lots of SaaS have cheaper annual pricing. IIUC Adobe lets you get the cheaper annual pricing and then pay for it on a monthly basis. If you cancel early, you have to pay out the rest of your annual plan. This is no different than if you'd paid for it up front, and prevents people from signing up for the annual plan to get a cheaper monthly price and then canceling early.
My last interaction with Adobe is a few years back, what I recall is:
I got tricked into the "pay monthly for annual subscription" (it was probably written there, just hidden very good). I then cancelled my subscription and instead of telling me "it runs anyway another 10 months", they let me cancel early, charging me a cancellation fee (which I only realized after it was too late) which was _higher_ than the remaining months.
Now I will never ever buy something from Adobe again.
There's seem to be a lot of reports for Adobe continuing to charge a credit card 12-18 months after confirmed cancellation and no recourse or anyone to access for help because the account is closed.
It’s the dumbest argument ever. Find a perpetual software license or 12 month subscription that allows for cancellation for convenience.
I get why some folks are angry, it was easier to pirate Adobe back in the day. If people don’t want to pay, there’s all sorts of competition in different segments of the market as well as open source.
The problem is that the 12 month contract is (a) pulled out of their ass and not reflective of the real costs for either party, and (b) until very recently not even disclosed (even in recent months, there are plenty of reports of cancellation fees from people with screenshots of having correctly chosen the monthly version). The very highest cancellation fee that makes sense is the delta between the monthly rate and what the annual rate projected on to the number of months of payment would be. If an annual subscription is cheaper because of risk or the time value of money, even that delta is a vast overestimate of Adobe's damages, and the fact that they're asking for 10x-20x is a blatant abuse of power.
> Find a perpetual software license or 12 month subscription that allows for cancellation for convenience.
All of them with Canadian customers, for example. It's a product with incremental costs and incremental value, so cancelling it (neither paying incremental costs nor forcing the service provider to do the same) makes perfect sense.
> It was easier to pirate back in the day
That's not the problem at all. Gimp is way better than the piratable photoshop ever was. It's not useful to ad hominem people who don't want to be abused.
I don't know about Canada, but here in France many things come as a long-term contract with monthly payments and cancelation fees. Most common which come to mind are mobile phone plans and ISP subscriptions.
Many companies still have 12 or 24 months plans, and you're on the hook for some form of penalty if you cancel before the term. And no, I'm not talking about buying a plan-subsidized phone, even "naked" plans have this.
Since some years ago, companies have started offering monthly-only plans, so you can cancel anytime. But, for some reason, there still are cancelation fees, which are fixed. What's funny, is that they also usually offer rebates if you switch providers, which usually cover those fees.
I'm not saying this is a good thing, but, at least where I live, the Adobe scheme is fairly common.
No way. I have no problem paying. I don't even mind the price. When I signed up last time I chose the monthly option because thats what I was used to for nearly every subscription. I didn't do the math to notice it matched the price of the annual subscription and not once was the cancellation fee mentioned. I was totally caught off guard by the fee and was lucky it was close
to the end of the contract.
It's the same shit internet providers used to do in the US that thankfully they can no longer do. I cannot understand anyone defending Adobe on this if they actually used that plan the way they explained it. Maybe it's better now,
but it absolutely was shady as hell a few years ago.
It isn't a monthly subscription. Its an annual subscription broken up into 12 payments.
I understand that there was a lawsuit and all that, I read through part of the Adobe thread from the other day. I am not defending Adobe in that regard.
If you only want the software for 2-3 months, the month-to-month agreement is available, but if you have a longer-term need for the software you get a discount for committing to a year's worth. If you take the discount, pay the cheaper monthly cost and then cancel before the end of the commitment, a penalty seems fair.
Again I am not defending whatever obfuscation of terms that led to the oft-mentioned lawsuit, just that there seems to be some confusion about monthly and annual commitments.
I had no idea a monthly subscription was even available. You have to ask the website in my region for “more details and more plans” to even see the monthly subscription.
Also because they offer “a discount” on the first year here, it’s 38€ month/yearly plan or 104€ a month/monthly.
I don’t know. If you’re going to allow Adobe to buy its competitors and monopolise entire regions of our economy, this seems a bit shit.
Yes, it is really up to Adobe's marketing team to make sure that customers are not misunderstanding the plan. If the misunderstanding continues, then the government might end up stepping in.
I always wonder how the licensing works with stuff like this.
Say I create a logo with one of these fonts, and immediately cancel afterword. Do I get to continue using the logo? Or is my license to the font technically revoked?
Also, font licensing elsewhere sucks for making native applications. They have this bizarre price structure where for web it's cheap, but if you want to embed it in an App it's 10x the price. It bums me out because occasionally I'd like to use/buy fonts for projects but they're out of reach. I took the first google result to test this real quick, "Web" or "Desktop" usage is $78, but "App" is $1,326 (https://www.myfonts.com/products/astros-package-83387/licens...).
And I guess they've moved to doing subscriptions for all licenses there too.. so I guess I'll never be buying a font again. Maybe that was the answer all along https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J06tluN7rtE
The key thing to understand about typeface copyright is you can copyright the font file, but not the actual shape of the font (as that video you linked covers).
So say as you said, you had access to a font, you used it in a logo. Then you lost access. It's fine to keep using the logo, any assets you've created while you had access you can keep using. What you can't do is keep using that font file on your machine to start making making new assets. This is why for graphic design fonts are often licensed based on the number of machines they're installed on.
For web, it's often a subscription for a certain number of page views. If you no longer pay the subscription, then you're no longer allowed to serve the font file. Enforcing this however, is really tricky for foundries as you'd expect.
For app use, the license don't account for 'page views' as they figure it's impossible to track (and for the foundry to check). That's often why the figure is more for native apps. They're also kinda taking a guess that companies making apps pay more.
This is why a lot of big businesses will just outright 'buy' a font, so they have access forever with no limitations. If you're committing to a particular font for your brand, it often makes sense to just drop the cash and get it. It's also why so many really big companies just make or commission their own typefaces - it can be cheaper than trying to find some deal with a foundry. A good typeface will take one person about 2-3 years to make, but if you have 1k employees.... no biggie.
It's worth noting most serious foundries don't focus on 'small' customers - they're targeting very large businesses. The pricing doesn't scale down to most normal people, unfortunately - however if they did they'd be dramatically reducing income from the 'whales'. There's also undeniably a bit of price-value bias.
This all varies a bit foundry to foundry, but that's the most common setups and why.
> Say I create a logo with one of these fonts, and immediately cancel afterword. Do I get to continue using the logo? Or is my license to the font technically revoked?
From the perspective of US copyright law, a font file is an odd sort of computer program that generates shapes. The program is copyrighted, but the shapes it outputs are not.
Indeed, US copyright law explicitly states that typefaces - i.e. the shapes printed on paper, not the font program which produces them - are ineligible for copyright. This applies even to fantasy scripts; e.g. the script used in the video game Riven was refused registration on these grounds.
At least on Mac, when you install them locally, Creative Cloud makes them available to every app like any other font.
They’re just regular OpenType files, albeit with “beware of the leopard” levels of filesystem obfuscation, so it’s fairly trivial to divorce them from Creative Cloud’s control if you want/need to.
And on the web, Typekit is just CSS and woff(2), so again, no (technical) impediment to doing whatever you want with them.
lots of complaints here (for good reason) but really I have to applaud any try at staying in business with high quality fonts -- Adobe and others, too. The economics don't make sense for what is being handled. Keep trying new approaches..
that's a fine example - of what I am not thinking of.. BBS are online, low-res, signal not content.. whereas print fonts are high-resolution, content in themselves, and not replaced by smart phone users in 7pt squint sessions.. lacking delivery context in the discussion invites easy dismissal.. btw- support cash, coins and stamps.. you will miss them when they are gone, and the replacement can get very toxic, very quickly.
You're right — a font is as still useful today as it was 30 years ago. But there is no longer a market for them. They were commoditized a long time ago. My memory of the 90's is rusty but I feel like it was a company like Bitstream that came around and so undercut the font market in a race to the bottom that, even then, it was clear that selling fonts was a dying business.
To use Arial when Proxima Nova or Helvetica are available is a deeply hideous act. Why on earth does Adobe sound proud to announce that Arial is finally in their lineup?!
I don’t know a single designer or developer that likes Adobe. There have been so many hostile decisions, so many dark UX patterns.
I am happy to live an Adobe-free life!
I tried to buy Lighthouse and it was a headspinning experience, took me a while to figure out it was a very overpriced subscription version with a confusing sign up experience I didn't trust. I felt like I was going to be scammed if I clicked the wrong button. So I ended up using Luminar Neo, even though I don't like it.
Reminds me of using one of those awful Microsoft maze websites like Azure.
As far as I'm concerned, there are only 3 fonts: serif, sans serif, and wacky. All serif fonts look the same to me, and all sans serif fonts look the same to me. The wacky fonts - no one would use them for anything except for a birthday party flyer.
I am greatly amused whenever someone rants about how Helvetica is beautiful and Arial is terrible. They're the same thing.
