Once upon a time in the wild and free years before 2012, a designer would scrape together $1,700 to buy an Adobe Creative Suite software package, which came in a box filled with compact discs. It was a tangible item that you owned outright for the rest of your life. In fact, you can still buy one of these boxes today on eBay for under $40. Maybe only for decoration, but hey, it’s a thing.
This software suite contains most everything needed to create print and digital design and earn a living. Other than some upgrades, this software could last a designer 6-10 years. Today a professional Adobe Creative Cloud software subscription costs $54.99 per month, per person. So, it’s kind of like buying it all over again every 2 1/2 years. And if you can’t make that $54.99 payment each month, you’re shut off and you can’t earn a living to make the money to pay for your subscription. You never walk away with software that you can use. You just pay and pay and pay until you stop designing or die.
Sound familiar? This is the current way of the world. Companies don’t want to sell a product once any more, they want us on the hook for that never-ending payment plan. We accept it because honestly, we don’t have much of a choice in many cases. Adobe figuratively has a monopoly over designers. It’s the industry standard, as ubiquitous as its PDF.
So when Adobe makes changes like discontinuing use of certain fonts or Pantone spot colors, it deals a blow to designers. The Pantone Color Matching System has been around since 1963 and it’s not just the industry standard, it’s the ONLY method to deliberately choose colors for print work. For whatever reason, Adobe and Pantone have parted ways regarding the use of these specific colors. Now, if a designer needs to use a spot color, they’ll have to … wait for it … subscribe to something else.
A $15/month Pantone Connect subscription will allow designers to select Pantone spot colors in Adobe programs again. This affects freelance designers, agencies, as well as every single print shop, sign-maker, or company that deals in this universal color system. Meaning all of them. There is no workaround.
What can you get for $15 a month? Unlimited cinematic streaming entertainment on Netflix or all of the music in the entire world on Spotify, or umm, yeah… the right to choose a color. If you’re a small company, every one of these subscriptions are per user, per month. The fees pile up rapidly when you factor in all of the tools used to run a creative company. Production management, website plugins, hosting and features, accounting software, emails, the list is monstrous, and I don’t think Pantone spot color selection measures up to any one of those other subscriptions. But there it is.
Pantone should let the color naming system go into public domain. Escalator was a brand until everyone called those moving stairs escalators. Band-Aid is perilously close to losing their brand name because of common usage. At some point, when you are the owner of names of colors that are the ONLY ones used by every single printer and designer in the United States — I think it’s unethical to charge everyone $15 a month to use them. They don’t even make the actual inks. They just named colors... and only nature owns the actual colors.
Alas, capitalism dictates that we will be forced to pay and play along. At the moment, companies using a subscription model have us all by the cojones and the monthly expenses keep rising — squeezing tighter. Don’t even get me started on TV channels and entertainment apps, I’ll save that for another blog.
