Adobe in Berlin

Every creative I know runs on Adobe. Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign—not luxuries. If you’re doing visual work for a living, these are what you use.

I went to the Creative Cloud event in Berlin that June. The Postbahnhof, about a thousand people, all of them depending on the same tools. There were talks about new features, updates to the software. But what I actually remember is just being in a room full of people who wrestle with the same interface every day, who know every workaround, who get excited about incremental improvements to software they’ll never stop using.

I couldn’t tell you what was announced specifically. The software moves fast enough that anything from 2015 feels quaint now. But the event itself made something obvious: Adobe controls the infrastructure of visual creativity for a huge number of people. If you make work like this, you’re using their tools. That’s just the reality.

There were art installations—I remember a helmet-thing called the EYEsect that was supposed to change how you see. The kind of object that makes perfect sense at a creative event and nowhere else. A Berlin collective called Klebebande ran some kind of contest. It was fine. The networking was what it always is: awkward and occasionally useful.

What I think about now is the dependency. Not bitterly—Adobe made good tools. Your work got better using them. But sitting in that crowd, you realize you’re part of a system. You pay for access. Your professional life, for a lot of people, runs on infrastructure they don’t own.

I probably wouldn’t go to one of these again. But I’m glad I went. It’s good to see the machinery up close, to be in a room full of people who understand what it costs and what it’s worth.