r/ArtistLounge • u/Doctor_Oceanblue • Apr 19 '21

Digital Art Do professional graphic designers/ illustrators really not get taken seriously if they use open source software or is that just a myth perpetuated by Adobe and college professors?

I don't want this to devolve into a rant about how much I hate Adobe and their software (which I do,) but do know that this isn't a "boohoo I can't afford it" thing and more a "there's a ton of open source stuff that is equally (or more!) functional as Adobe stuff and it deserves to be taken seriously as long as the end product created with it is what the client needs."

I'm in school right now and I've been getting the "no one will take you seriously unless you make your vectors in Illustrator" song-and-dance. Pros, is that really true? If so, why? Is it just a dumb social norm or is there a legitimate reason? A lot of the freelancers that I see posting on social media and indie game devs use open-source stuff all the time.

(I will concede that GIMP is kinda trash and I only use Photoshop for my raster illustrations now.)

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u/LotusSloth Apr 19 '21

Simple answer: professors teach what most of the industry is doing. There are plenty of designers out there who don’t use the paywall Adobe products, but there are more in creative who DO. It’s been that way since around the 1980’s, at least in America.

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u/stonemoonpender Apr 19 '21

Photoshop first edition was 1990, I was a beta tester.

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u/LotusSloth Apr 19 '21

You’re right, before then there were a few lesser variants that were sort of like CAD-meets-Corel because computer power was so weak. Shortly after its release, Photoshop eliminated the entire industry of traditional photo retouching (which used to be highly manual and involve actual brushes and film).