Who's Invested in an Adobe Creative Cloud Subscription

[accelerator]

Hi Guys

I'm just interested to know if anyone here has invested in an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. I'm thinking of doing this, but at £46.88 a month, it seems a little bit pricey, and I might just stick with the CS3 setup I have.

Let me know your thoughts of Creative Cloud, or if you're using an alternative cheaper web design and graphic design solution, let me know what you think of that.

Cheers

 

[Retired_Member38]

Hi Guys

I'm just interested to know if anyone here has invested in an Adobe Creative Cloud subscription. I'm thinking of doing this, but at £46.88 a month, it seems a little bit pricey, and I might just stick with the CS3 setup I have.

Let me know your thoughts of Creative Cloud, or if you're using an alternative cheaper web design and graphic design solution, let me know what you think of that.

Cheers

Unless you're a professional designer (and I'm going to go out on a limb here and assume you're not ) then it doesn't seem worth the money.

Hire a designer to do the real work, then use whatever you already have or whatever is free to do the tweaks you need.

 

[accelerator]

do you use a mac or pc?

pc

 

[Retired_Member38]

Have you seen the educational price? I don't believe adobe actually check you are a student or employee of an educational establishment.

(from LG G3)

If you're going to steal it, why not just torrent the last available 'full' package that was available before it swapped to a subscription model ?

 

[Retired_Member38]

Pain to get the updates I imagine, plus with the subscription you can have both Mac and PC releases, with two activations allowed. Suppose it depends how one personally feels about the ethics of paying something vs nothing at all.

A close relative of mine qualifies. Occasionally I've used one of the programmes to create a PDF. She's never been audited or had to provide any proof of her educational connection but could do if asked.


(from iPhone)

Did she create her account from a clearly educational email address? My dad for a time had an ac.uk email as he was working as a tutor... he bought a couple of software things and they would only give the student discount with that type of email address.

 

[Skinner]

When I was a student on a web design course (which taught some shocking bad habits) just to put it on my CV. I bought a copy inc Photoshop and Dreamweaver.

I had register my ac.uk email (where the code was sent), and I had to get the college stamp on the order form. I think that was all I needed. I bought from the college shop in the end as they was even cheaper than adobe direct, no idea why, but was about £65 cheaper.

 

[Retired_Member38]

When I was a student on a web design course (which taught some shocking bad habits) just to put it on my CV.

Do you think that helped you? With hindsight would you do it again?

Personally I wouldn't think those type of courses or certificates are worth the paper they're printed on. Things move too quickly for a course in web design (or seo, PPC, or anything else similar) to be worth bothering with imo.

Examples of previous work are all I care about. I've no idea if the designer I use even has a single GCSE or a PHD from Oxford...

 

[WealdDomains]

...

 

[Skinner]

At the time I thought doing such a course would help tidy up my bad habits and give me something extra. I had previously done HNC level programming and a networking (computers) course. Both the programming and networking courses massively improved my skillset.

The web design and development course was totally pointless and as you suggest was totally outdated. Laughably so, where I lost out a distinction for C&G Level 3 for using a stylesheet instead of inline code and some other similar things, because the syllabus required out of date things.

The graphic design modules was even worse, Level 1 (as best I can recall) literally consisted of opening photoshop, showing you around the menus, opening a file, resizing, rotating, cropping and saving files.

If I had no knowledge at all, the basics for the courses may help with a foundation, if you know any of the basics the courses just wasted stacks of my money.

 

[AssetDomains]

If its just to use as a html/php/css editor then no its not need at all use something like sublime text.
If you use the video and image editing tools then maybe but for standard website stuff it seems expensive.

 

[accelerator]

The web design and development course was totally pointless and as you suggest was totally outdated. Laughably so, where I lost out a distinction for C&G Level 3 for using a stylesheet instead of inline code and some other similar things, because the syllabus required out of date things.

This is rather lamentable. I don't want to be dismissive though, as there are some courses that help to improve your career, mainly the ones that offer proof that you can do something, e.g. CISCO networking courses. With web design however, it is true that it moves very fast, and there is everything you need to teach yourself online. Also, a decent portfolio site will demonstrate your skill better than anything.

Rgds

 

[Skinner]

The networking course was awesome, it went through everything from making your own cables, different types of cables, routers, modems, switches, bridges, layouts and plans, you name it.

The programming courses taught me a lot about code format, readability, housekeeping, using available DLL's instead of reinventing the wheel, modular code etc. I used to write code with variables like $a, $b, $b, or $this, $that, $theother. The course got me writing $intTotal, $strChrName, $boolActive, and formatting my code etc. Sounds really basic stuff but I was self taught so most my code was script kiddie learned.

A foundation course in html so you can code in notepad would be useful. So you understand the core elements but web design as a whole at college level was useless.

Its also worth pointing out, if you are a legit student and buy student software, Adobe have no issues with your commercial use, nor continuing to use it after you leave education. They also allow you to purchase commercial upgrades should you wish to move to the latest products. I believe Microsoft are in the same boat, so I assume most others are too.

If your looking into dreamweaver, I would recommend Zend Studio for php/html, I only wish I could afford it (justify it) but having a built in step in, out, over compiler so you can walk through your code and see exactly where errors are, place breaks in code etc is outstanding. Something I miss from lower level languages.

 

[martin-s]

Skinner: all you need for that is Chrome developer tools (F12). It's the best thing out there

 

[Skinner]

Martin, I've used that with JavaScript but didn't know it could do it with PHP.

Are you sure were talking about the same thing? Where you can put break points and pause execution to look inside variables etc. Like in visual studio, you load the application and use step over or step in to load the code line by line, once you see the code works you can step out and it resumes execution.

I would assume chrome would need a local compiler to do it ?

I think this video shows vis studio doing something similar,http://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jXZuEA3XUeo

 

[spiderspider]

I have a cloud subscription, but this is just for lightroom.

My main need for it, is the mass import and resize of images to various sizes for different clients needs. Whilst I know other software can do it, I have worked with lightroom for years. I think it costs my £8 a month or something like that.

Anything I can't do in lightroom, I do in Gimp. Used to have a dodgy copy of PS, which was OK, but can't be bothered with it now.

 

[alex]

I was on CS3 until March when I upgraded our CC licenses for the office. Not sure if they're still doing it, but we got it half price first year due to the existing CS3 licenses.

I didn't think there was much of a difference, but going back to an old computer a few weeks ago I just couldn't cope going back to CS3. In terms of dreamweaver it was the little things like error handling, compatibility checking, code colouring and the fact it tells you how many files are being uploaded via FTP and how many are remaining - CS3 just had the generic progress bar.

That said, these features are not exactly specific to CC: notepad++ and filezilla will do the job. I use dreamweaver as a glorified text editor so can't speak for the inbuilt features.

The big thing for me is compatibility and easy collaboration. If I'm working with designers using inDesign, PhotoShop and Illustrator, it's good to be able to see everything and share without worrying about compatibility.

 

[martin-s]

Time you moved over to Sublime Alex

 

[alex]

Time you moved over to Sublime Alex

I really should... you're not the first to tell me that. I'm happy to take a look, but I'm not so good at breaking habits when I'm used to doing something. I've been trying to move from my 4 year old laptop to my shiny new iMac for months, but I just can't do it

 

[wonder_lander]

I've got the Lightroom and PS package. As someone who upgraded regularly as the new version of lightroom came out it's not a bad model.

 

[stellar73]

I've got the Lightroom and PS package. As someone who upgraded regularly as the new version of lightroom came out it's not a bad model.

Got this one too and love it - from memory I think it's just under £9 a month.
Totally worth it for photographers and anyone that needs Photoshop for any purpose.