I've finally signed up for the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite, God help me. Subscription models seem to be all the rage now: I'll be engaging in that myself in couple months when I migrate to Squarespace. I got the $60/month Creative Cloud package, which comes out to a painful $720 a year (with prices likely only to go up). I currently have a 7-day free trial, and right now, I'm downloading parts of certain apps, like Illustrator, InDesign, etc. I'm not sure my old, antiquated internet connection can handle the strain of the download; everything on my computer has slowed to a crawl. I'm hoping all of this is worth it. That's a lot of money for a guy with no income to spend per year.
...I just went through the quick, five-minute Illustrator tutorial. Illustrator feels a lot like Photoshop Elements, which I already have as a separate purchase. What's new about Illustrator, though, is that (1) I can do more in terms of shapes, shading, background objects, etc., and (2) the graphics/shapes I create can be resized as vectors, meaning they won't lose resolution/fineness if I enlarge them because the shapes are basically mathematical formulae that can be precisely re-proportioned.
InDesign doesn't seem to have its own tutorial (or maybe it does, but I didn't find it), so I might have to look one up on YouTube to learn the basics. I'm impatient to put a few of my mss (manuscripts, plural) onto InDesign, where I can make both ebook versions of my work and dead-tree versions. This feels like gaining superpowers. The Creative Cloud suite comes with dozens of other apps as well, so I'll be learning a lot of those, too. One thing I'll likely stay away from, though, is anything having to do with generative AI. I know enough about art to feel confident about making my own stuff; I don't think I need a creativity cheat. Granted, I'm not Picasso or Rembrandt, but I can nevertheless make passable drawings after years and years of doodling with pen and brush.
More later. This is exciting. My brain is turning back on.
This coming week ought to be interesting.
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