Adobe Illustrator licence up for renewal

Discussion
1

We agreed to trial having a licence for Illustrator

The basis was on the Makerspace providing equipment/facilities that wouldn’t easily be available to members otherwise

The licence comes up for renewal on 26th May, so it would be excellent to hear from members about how they’ve used it and see if it’s providing value to us as a Makerspace

It’s £182.40 per year

All views welcome, but particularly interested in members who don’t already have access to this software – for fairly obvious reasons…

The the software itself is not in question here, but the usefulness of having it

So: what’s your Illustrator experience over the last 12 months?

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Never had access to it before, found it to be an incredibly useful tool for designing jigs and images for laser cutting.
Previously had been playing around on inkscape which lacks a lot of the functionality found in illustrator.

+1 for renewal from me.

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3

I use it when lasering too. Much better than Inkscape and coral in my opinion, however I’m more familiar with adobe products, so my view is skewed. +1 here too with an added ‘how much would photoshop cost to licence and is that an option?’ thrown in for good measure.

Edit: I use photoshop at the space, but log into my personal adobe cc account to do so. Just think if others had access to it that’d be great as it’s a fantastic bit of kit.

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Last year I was using illustrator and Photoshop for screen printing laser cutting.

The Photoshop access has gone, I think this was a members personal account added to one of the Pc’s.

I don’t have personal access and particularly founf Photoshop very useful for laser and printing purpose.

It was discussed briefly in the last meeting and the action was for me to look at prices, but I became busy - sorry.

5

Meh, I’m an opensource guy, I would prefer to pay someone to give members tutorials how to use opensource alternatives then pay the licence , but that’s just me…

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As much as I’d like to support open source, Inkscape is definitely not the best all-round solution and having done several laser inductions many people enjoy the utility of Illustrator.

I think as soon as you go for more than single-app you basically have to get the master suite which is $$$, probably not worth it for us as we’d likely only use Illustrator and Photoshop.

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I’ve been making everything in inkscape , I found illustrator bloated and difficult to use.

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+1 for illustrator

my experience
found it more reliable than inkscape which in my experience (i maybe im doing something wrong) communicates less well with the trotec spftware.

also i prefer the illustrator interface and find it easier to use with more features that i use.

ive spent about the same amount of time trying to use both and found i was more comfortable quicker and was acheiving more complex stuff more reliably with illustrator.

personal opinion
this is my personal experience.
maybe with some help i could get beetter with inkscape but i normally “just want to get stuff done as quickly as possible” rather than spending a lot of time learning something and blah blah.

For the Space
in terms of if this is right for SLMS i would say yes.
because i would say we are buying a tool for the space.
we can still have the opensource stuff as well
this is just another option - (like having the option to use hands tools or powertools to do the same job in different ways in the woodshop).
we’re letting people try something that they might not have tried before

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There’s also the question of what machine we have this on – if it’s for design (it surely is?) then having it on the laser PC makes it inconvenient. I understand that it’s useful to have it on there if making minor adjustments, but we can surely find a more efficient way of using it, say on another machine and locally shared folders?

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Is it possible to buy an old licensed copy of a lifetime product?

Have they improved that much for normal use?

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Buying would be one thing, unfortunately it’s increasingly rental these days

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Can you offer an Inkscape workshop or a link to a good video?

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How does licensing work? Is a network installation possible with only one session/user running at a time?

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@RobertL Can you please keep your responses to one post instead using quotes to reply to individual comments.

As for the point about licensing, it is a monthly subscription model, it would be necessary to go with this rather than Adobe Illustrator CS6 as people will need to be able to open files created on more recent versions of Adobe and this isn’t possible. It is also only possible to open Adobe Illustrator CC 2018 on one computer at a time per seat, if we only pay for one seat that is one concurrent user.

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ideally it would be good if you could design and cut on the laser pc.
but, this isn’t very cooperative if there are other people waiting and you’re hogging the laser pc for hours.

this suggests that a more practical / sociable approach is to design on your own device or on either the mac or the sewing PC. Is it time to spend some money on a top end Mac and PC for design work in the space?

that kinda implies we need 3 machines covered by the licence. fine with me. 3 machines seem to be just about right.

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Adobe do pretty good non-profit discounts on membership of their full creative suite. It’s worth checking out on their website.

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I am not convinced that we need a more powerful machine, the ones we have seem good enough.

I wonder if we should consider putting a 2nd laser PC in place with a switch so that two people can be there flipping back and forth between two computers.

This has already been explored, the term non-profit refers to a US 501c Non-Profit which is equivalent to a CIC or Charity in the UK, which we are not an cannot become. We are only non-profit in terms of share dividend.

18

Save as older version?

Do we really need top end? Surely any decent modern machine with ssd and 8gb+ would work fine?

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i think this plan suits us. no up front lump sum. pay as long as we want it.
keep the tool up to date.

personally at home i dont have this. i dont feel like i can afford it, and on that basis won’t buy it [pay for it].

when i think about it for the space i would apply different logic.

  • does that tool add benefit?
  • is it affordable?
  • does it allow people to use something that they cant afford individually?
  • does it allow people to be more creative?
  • does it make the space cooler?

i think the answer to all these questions is yes and on that basis i would and still say illustrator +1

20

I subscribe to the full Adobe Creative Cloud package which allows access to all Adobe Apps on two computers, and apparently it may be OK if one of those computers is at the makerspace.

I called Adobe support asking if I could share my licence with 340 people for a non-profit collective, and amazingly, they said - “sounds like a a good cause, we will ask management”
I’m waiting for a reply in writing.
Worth pursuing? If successful this would make available all (admittedly closed source) Adobe apps as well as Illustrator.

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