Green Gecko wrote:
For an indefinite license that's still a good option, if you are confident nothing will crop up to boost your productivity. When you are earning, if something saves you even half an hour that either nets you more for your time or alleviates time pressure on other tasks. For example, for me Fireworks CS6 generates CSS classes for complex effects in a mockup. I could write or edit the same code but that takes seconds and I get the exact result I've already signed off. I wouldn't pay hundreds of quid to buy a new version for that feature, but my boss will think I've done 5x the work.
It's not a waste if the upfront cost is enormous. Maybe the student prices are a better deal, I haven't checked, but you can't sell those on legitimately anyway.
If you use one or two apps exclusively then I can see why that might be awkward, but there are some immense apps in the package for the money that give you the opportunity to handle other workflows and develop transferable skills between applications. Obviously Adobe want to coerce people onto more of the suite and without the huge upfront cost that becomes doable for many people, by actually earning money doing digital arts or a reasonable level of student finance. I'd wager that the payoff is the person becomes more palatable to studio employment if they are familiar with a range of the suite, even if it's just Acrobat or some basic motion graphics in AE. Or even an abortion of a Website in Muse.
I've got a personal subscription through work (as only 2 of us are using it) but I work in between loads of stuff doing interactive design / web development so it's really useful for us not to have to outlay thousands of pounds.
The updates are really frequent and there are some cool new tools that are changing what work I might be able to do for the company.
Interesting. Cheers for that btw. If I was a graphic designer then I doubt I'd even have to think about it, but as an Illustrator I am using a lot less tools. I probably use about 4% of what stuff like Photoshop can do

It does what I need it to though. I'm mostly hand drawn adding stuff in, or with Ai doing vector images. Ugh, need to think about this a lot. The point about being familiar with all the software is good, as having access to InDesign would certainly be very useful. I've only used that a few times, as before teachers used to love Quark.
Had to make my PDF portfolio in Ai yesterday as I don't have ID. It worked fine, but I'm sure it would have been even easier in ID.