The U.S. Department of Justice has filed a lawsuit against Adobe alleging that the company deceives consumers by hiding the early-termination fee and making it difficult for people to cancel their subscriptions.
In the complaint filed on Monday, the DOJ wrote that “Adobe has harmed consumers by enrolling them in its default, most lucrative subscription plan without clearly disclosing important plan terms.”
The government says Adobe pushed consumers toward the “annual paid monthly” subscription without informing them that cancelling the plan in the first year would cost hundreds of dollars.
Adobe only discloses the early-termination fees when subscribers attempt to cancel, and turns the early-termination fee into a “powerful retention tool” by trapping consumers in subscriptions that they no longer want, the complaint says.
“During enrolment, Adobe hides material terms of its APM plan in fine print and behind option textboxes and hyperlinks, proving disclosures that are designed to go unnoticed and that most consumers never see,” according to the complaint. “Adobe then deters cancellations by employing an onerous and complicated cancellation process.”
Adobe says it plans to refute the claims in court.
“Subscription services are convenient, flexible and cost effective to allow users to choose the plan that best fits their needs, timeline and budget,” said Adobe’s General Counsel and Chief Trust Officer Dana Rao, in a statement. “Our priority is to always ensure our customers have a positive experience. We are transparent with the terms and conditions of our subscription agreements and have a simple cancellation process.”
The DOJ’s complaint says Adobe has violated federal laws designed to protect consumers. The government is seeking “injunctive relief, civil penalties, equitable monetary relief, as well as other relief.”
Adobe shifted to a subscription model in 2012 and started requiring consumers to pay for access to the company’s software on a recurring basis. In the past, users could access the company’s software after paying a one-time fee.
Subscriptions account for most of the company’s revenue, according to the Federal Trade Commission, which launched a similar lawsuit against Amazon last year, saying it “knowingly” complicates the ability of customers of its Prime service to cancel their subscriptions.
Have you seen the new Adobe *logo*? It appears in promotional videos introducing Adobe’s Photoshop and Illustrator with generative artificial intelligence, and it looks more luscious than a doughnut at a gluten-free convention.
Instead of using the classic red “A” graphic mark that Adobe users know from the company’s arsenal of creative tools, the videos show a new design: A sleek, slanting “A” that precedes the letters “dobe,” which are set in a bold typeface. It looks so cool that I thought Adobe had at last updated its brand.
Except, well, it’s not the new Adobe logo. According to Heather Combs, Adobe’s head of brand strategy and customer insights, it’s not a logo at all. Rather, she says, it’s a wordmark. “It’s not replacing the logo; it’s just a new expression in the way that we are creating the way our brand shows up in the world,” she says.
Combs popped my happy bubble over a video chat last week, after I inquired about the new look, casually (and hopefully) asking if this was the dawn of a new branding era at Adobe. Combs emphatically told me that this glorious new mark, seen across Adobe promotional videos, isnot a logo; it’s simply a new part of its brand tool kit. “We’ve had a logo for a long time. A beautiful logo, which is still our logo moving forward. We’ve just added a new piece to the tool kit so we can express the brand in multiple ways,” she says.
[Images: Adobe]
Combs is referring to the corporate logo that illustrator Marva Warnock (wife of the company’s cofounder John Warnock), designed in 1982 for Adobe’s launch. Warnock’s design featured a slanted “A” whose crossbar formed an open triangle. Though Adobe updated Warnock’s design in 1990 to the red, white, and black logo still used today, the company has had a shockingly consistent visual language from its earliest days. Which is why a new logo would have been so exciting.
Combs’ distinction between logo and wordmark rests on intention. A wordmark can be a logo. Just look at Coca-Cola, Google, and FedEx—designs that are made with letters set in a typeface. A logo—a term that comes from Greek for “word”—is generally understood by most humans to be anything that represents a brand. That can be a graphic mark (Apple’s bitten apple), a logotype (IBM), or a combination of both, sometimes called a graphical logo (Nike, Target, and Unilever).
In the case of Adobe, this wordmark isn’t the official corporate logo, and therefore, by the rules of corporate branding 101, it cannot be considered a logo at all. Combs says the company toyed with its new design at last year’s Adobe Max conference, but there weren’t any “hard rollouts.” Not until these new generative AI promo videos, that is. It’s really a shame because this design is better than any logo refresh I can think of in recent memory.
The new Adobe wordmark is modern and futuristic, yet it looks so classic that it could have easily been Adobe’s first logo from the ’80s. Just look at the perfect way the classic “A” mark integrates with the “dobe” set in a heavy weight of the Adobe Clean typeface.
“We felt that we were missing a bit of a bolder version of Adobe Clean,” Combs explains. This led Adobe’s typography team to craft a new version that was bolder and took up “a bit more presence,” as Combs describes it. As a result of this exercise, Combs says they are “also looking at the weight of the corporate mark as well.” It seems like the right move because, right now, the official “Adobe” feels rather anaemic and more boring than beige.
[Image: Adobe]
Even though it’s not a logo, the new mark does feel like it’s coming at a pivotal time for the company as it enters its AI era. When I asked Combs if this wordmark was the herald of the new generative AI Adobe, she deflected, saying that while she could see different places where they would use the mark, she won’t confirm it as a mascot for Adobe’s generative-AI tools.
Still, she concedes: “With what we were doing around generative AI and Firefly, we wanted to be more on the edge. And I think we see the wordmark as being a very fresh, bold kind of way to express the brand. Again, not in replacement of the corporate mark, but a really interesting and intriguing way to express the brand.”
When I told her that the wordmark is awesome and perhaps it would confuse people who might mistake it as a new official logo, she says she doesn’t believe that’s the case. “Our objective is to put the Adobe brand in people’s mouths to make them think about us and want to talk about us,” she says. “If this new wordmark creates a point of interest, then it’s doing its job.”
Combs insists that Adobe has no plans to quietly swap its current logo to the new wordmark. She believes its merits are clear. “It’s not broken. Our corporate mark is widely recognized. It is something a lot of people see and feel very positive things about. And I want to continue to sort of build off of that,” she says. Though, she does admit, the wordmark is a bit more scalable to social and places where the current Adobe logo can feel a bit cramped. “This wordmark gives us a bit more of a compact way to express the brand,” she says.
Exactly! Combine that with the cool factor, the classic look, and the obvious tie into the new generative AI era, and you’ve got a rock-solid case to evolve the corporate brand. As an Adobe fan since Photoshop version 2, I sure hope that happens.
Available for use in Adobe InDesign, this easy-to-use resume/cv template provides a professional look.
Applying made easy—with this professional resume/curriculum vitae template you will have a good chance to get the job of your dreams. Created by freelance graphic designer, illustrator, and Adobe Stock contributor @Roverto Castillo, this Adobe InDesign is based on the standard size of A4. It consists of a cover letter and a resume page. Every section is fully editable. You can also add as many pages as you want. Customizing the pages is quite easy—with just a few clicks, you can add your own content to the predesigned layout. Based on a modern and simple design, this resume/cv template is the perfect solution to showcase your personality and skills in style. The layout consists of various, well-ordered subject areas.
Please note that this customizable resume/cv template requires Adobe InDesign. You can get the latest version from the Adobe Creative Cloud website—just take a look here. For those who want to learn more about this professional Adobe InDesign template, feel free to click on the following link. Using this template, you will definitely stand out from the crowd of competitors.
You can download this professional resume/curriculum vitae template for Adobe InDesign here. By the way, with an Adobe Stock trial subscription, you can download this high-quality InDesign file for free.
Do not hesitate to find more trending graphic design templates on WE AND THE COLOR. The category includes plenty of useful graphic stock material for different needs such as logos, patterns, countless vector files, or PSD mockups. For creative inspiration, we recommend having a look at our extensive Graphic Design category.
Adobe Photoshop is an incredibly complicated piece of software that is multifaceted and multipurpose. However, one of its lesser-known workspaces is going to be removed completely.
Adobe Photoshop might never have been synonymous with 3D work, but it has had the functionality for a good few years now. With the introduction of Adobe Dimensions (previously Project Felix), the 3D workspace did see more use, however. Adobe has now made the announcement that they are removing the core 3D engine within Photoshop, which necessitates the removal of all interactions in the 3D workspace, 3D printing, normal and bump maps, lighting effects, spherical panoramas, and the import and export of all 3D formats, among a few others elements.
There are a few features being removed that did see some use for photographers. For example, the spherical panoramas and the lighting effects in particular. The lighting effects didn’t — in my experience at least — seem to be creating results that would be impossible without reliance on the GPU or the 3D workspace, so perhaps that will be recreated in time.
In this video by photoshopCAFE, you will be given the reasons behind the removal, as well as some ways in which you can still access these features using older versions.
With Adobe InCopy, copywriters and editors can edit and style text, even while a designer is simultaneously working on the same document in partner program InDesign. So if you’re in the writing game and looking for the best desktop publishing software for your needs, it’s an option worth considering.
InCopy is part of Adobe’s Creative Cloud suite and there are several different ways you can access and pay for these apps. In this article, we explain how to download InCopy and try it out for free, the various subscription plans available, and what alternatives you might want to consider.
It is possible to download InCopy for free, but you’ll only be able to access it for a seven-day trial period. If you Google “Adobe InCopy”, the top search result should be Adobe’s main InCopy page. Here, you can click on Free Trial to access the download. You’ll be given the choice of trialling InCopy alone or alongside the entire Creative Cloud software set.
It’s worth noting that, when you sign up for the trial, you do have to give Adobe your payment details. And when the week is out, a paid subscription automatically begins. If you don’t want to commit to this, remember to cancel the subscription before the week is over. If you don’t, you may end up having to pay a cancellation fee.
During your seven free days, you can try out the various features of InCopy and decide whether you want to continue with it. After the trial, there’s no way to continue using InCopy for free, so you’ll have to consider the payment plans on offer.
How do I buy InCopy?
On the InCopy page on Adobe’s website, clicking either Choose a plan or Buy now will take you to the page where you can subscribe to the app. You’ll notice that all the plans are subscription-based; there is no option to pay a one-off fee to buy InCopy outright.
You can either subscribe to InCopy on its own or sign up for the Creative Cloud All Apps package. This includes over 20 creative apps, including some you might use alongside InCopy: page design app InDesign, image editing app Photoshop, and vector graphics program Illustrator, for example. If you’re going to be using several of the apps included, then the All Apps package can often work out cheaper.
Adobe offers various pricing options for InCopy (Image credit: Adobe)
What’s the price of InCopy?
The main subscription plan Adobe offers for InCopy costs $4.99 / £4.98 / AU$7.69 per month, though it requires you to commit to a year at a time. If you cancel before the year is over, there’s a cancellation fee of 50% of your remaining subscription. To avoid this, you can choose a subscription that costs $7.49 / £7.58 / AU$10.99 per month, which can be paused at any time. Or, you can prepay for a year’s subscription for $59.88 / £59.46 / AU$92.27.
If you’re likely to use InCopy on a regular basis, then the annual subscription is the best choice. But if you’re not going to use it every month, it may be more cost-effective to subscribe to the monthly plan as and when you need it.
The Creative Cloud All Apps plan has a similar pricing structure: $52.99 / £49.94 / AU$76.99 per month with an annual commitment; $79.49 / £75.85 / AU$114.99 per month with no annual commitment; or $599.88 / £596.33 / AU$871.07 for a full year.
These figures were correct at the time of writing, but prices outside the US often change alongside the exchange rates. It’s also worth noting that you can cancel any Adobe subscription for a full refund within the first 14 days.
InCopy discounts for teachers and students
Adobe offers a discount scheme through which students and teachers can subscribe to the Creative Cloud All Apps package—including InCopy, all the other desktop and mobile apps, and 100GB cloud storage—for a significantly lower price.
This costs $19.99 / £16.24 / AU$21.99 monthly for the first year, then $29.99 / £25.28 / AU$43.99 per month thereafter. Like with the standard plans, you need to commit to a year’s subscription. You can prepay for a full year, but this doesn’t work out cheaper. Adobe will ask for proof of your eligibility for the offer, such as a school-issued email address.
How can I get started with InCopy?
Though it can often be tricky learning new software, you’ll find InCopy quite intuitive once you’ve worked out the basics of how to use it. If you’re struggling, clicking the Learn & Support link on the InCopy web page will take you through to Adobe’s helpful set of guides, including how to use the workspace, styling text, linking documents with InDesign, and more.
This is the user interface of InCopy (Image credit: Adobe)
InCopy: Key info you need to know
InCopy is currently a desktop-only program and there is no version for mobile devices. Adobe does offer a range of mobile apps which have basic versions available to download for free, plus premium versions for subscribers. The closest InCopy equivalent among these is Adobe Comp, which is a layout design app, though this is more geared towards web design. There’s a notable lack of anything that can be used to edit longer text in Adobe’s mobile app portfolio, though this may be something that’s addressed in the future.
InCopy alternatives
If InCopy isn’t the right software for you, there are many other options available. Microsoft Publisher is a popular and accessible piece of publishing software that can be used for writing and page layout. It can be bought individually or as part of a Microsoft 365 subscription.
An open-source option is Scribus, which is free to download for Mac, Windows, and Linux. It has a wide range of features for writing and page layout, though it does have a steep learning curve if you’re a novice
Video communications are central to the modern workplace as creative teams continue to work together remotely, and Zoom has made it quick and easy for anyone to set up and conduct virtual meetings. Zoom’s mission — to make video communications frictionless and secure — aligns perfectly with one of our goals for Adobe Creative Cloud — making it as easy as possible to do your best creative work in a frictionless environment. That is why, today, we are thrilled to announce Zoom and Adobe are coming together. The new Zoom plugin for Adobe XD is making working together on creative work easier than ever.
We know remote work poses unique challenges for design teams that rely on close collaboration to bring their creations to life. Creativity is best when teams work and design together, feeding off each other’s ideas and building on them. Adobe XD powers collaboration at every step of the design process, from editing together in real-time with other designers to getting feedback from product managers, developers, and other stakeholders. And with the plugin, you can quickly join or start Zoom meetings directly from XD.
View and join a scheduled meeting or by meeting ID right from XD.
The Zoom plugin for XD brings visibility to upcoming Zoom meetings right inside XD so you will never be late for design reviews, user testing, and other sessions where you need to get feedback. This plugin lets you connect and sync your Zoom meetings in Google or Outlook calendar, so you will see them right within the XD Plugins Panel, front and center. When it is meeting time, it takes just one click to join and launch Zoom. You can even join with screen share enabled if you are the one presenting.
And you are connected to your team with screen sharing in an instant.
Coediting in Adobe XD: More interactive than ever with Zoom
Coediting in Adobe XD lets you and your team work together in real-time. You can invite other designers, copywriters, developers, and anyone else to view and edit documents with you.
In a virtual work environment, Zoom helps teams recreate some of the ways of working together, like discussing design options or reviewing changes. With the Zoom plugin for XD, you can start ad hoc meetings to review XD designs with other editors on the document. Click start to generate invites pre-filled with co-editors on the document, add or delete who you want in your meeting, then click send to email invites to your Zoom meeting — all without ever leaving XD.
Start design reviews with co-editors on XD documents in a few clicks.
If you and your team use Zoom for virtual meetings, you can install the Zoom plugin for XD here in the XD Plugin Manager to start working with Zoom in Adobe XD now.
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Marguerita Choy
(Reuters) – Adobe Inc ADBE.O said on Monday that it has put a new set of artificial intelligence tools into its digital marketing software with the aim of helping companies sharpen their marketing campaigns.
Once known for applications like Photoshop, Adobe has become one of the biggest providers of software for running such campaigns, which businesses use to decide which of thousands of images and pieces of written to content to show to potential customers. Growth in its marketing software division has helped send shares up nearly 50% this year.
The artificial intelligence features released on Monday aid that effort by, for example, scanning and labelling thousand of product images by colour and shape, or using natural-language processing technology to read an article to determine its subject.
That makes it easier for marketing campaigns to make a recommendation, whether that means showing a person browsing an e-commerce site a pair of shoes similar to ones they have previously viewed or a news website suggesting a story on a similar subject to the one just read.
Such artificial intelligence technology has existed for several years, but using it generally required corporate marketing departments to export data from their systems and work with another division of the business to use, slowing the work down, Ali Bohra, director of strategy and product marketing for intelligence services at Adobe, said in an interview. Adobe has placed the technologies directly inside the marketing systems, reducing the need to export data.
“When you’re thinking about the need to be agile and work in real time, this is not a process that works very well,” Bohra said.
Feature Image Credit: An Adobe Systems Inc software box is seen in Los Angeles, California, U.S., March 13, 2017. REUTERS/Lucy Nicholson
Reporting by Stephen Nellis in San Francisco; Editing by Marguerita Choy
Adobe and Amazon have collaborated on a new Alexa skill aimed at creatives, titled the Inspiration Engine. Ask your Alexa-controlled device to “open the Inspiration Engine” and you can unlock a host of features intended to aid creative block and inspire work. This ranges from “quick sparks” – inspirational quotes and one-sentence “meditations” from creatives such as Jessica Walsh, Pascal Campion or Weitong Mai – to creative-thinking exercises that can, for example, guide the viewer through one’s senses or environment in order to explore a project from a new perspective.
With an Alexa-compatible screen device, users can ask for inspirational imagery, displayed on Behance, Adobe’s online portfolio site. Users can also take the Creative Types quiz, created for Adobe by Anyways, which asks a series of multiple choice questions to define an individual creative personality – for example an Adventurer (seen above), a Visionary or a Dreamer. Previously an in-browser experience, for the Inspiration Engine, Alexa will take users through the quiz and reveal their type.
The launch comes off the back of a recent study by Adobe, finding that 89% of respondents often struggle to find inspiration. This new Alexa skill targets those designers and artists “staring at an empty page, canvas or dartboard for too long,” says Adobe on its blog, and hopes, with the new tool, to be involved in the earliest stage of the creative process – whereas its other products are used once ideas have already sprouted.
The Inspiration Engine is available in the US, UK, Canada, Australia and New Zealand.
Feature Image Credit: Anyways: Adobe Creative Types, the Adventurer
As mobile devices like Apple’s iPad Pro continue their surge in popularity, we’ve witnessed an influx of high-quality, desktop-grade creative applications — redesigned exclusively for optimization on iPad — arrive on the App Store.
Titles like Pixelmator and Affinity, for example, are just two of the many powerful photo editing apps you’ll discover on the App Store. Though not quite on par with Adobe’s ubiquitous Photoshop app for PC and macOS, these titles provide a solid photo-editing foundation for professionals and hobbyists, alike.
Those holding out for an even more robust and feature-packed photo editing experience on iPad will be delighted to know that Adobe — makers of the popular digital design software titles for Mac and PC — announced this week that it’s planning to launch a “full version” of its Photoshop app on iPad as early as next year.
The move to bring a full-featured Photoshop title to iPad is part of the company’s broader new strategy — by which it hopes to make its products compatible across multiple devices, thus bolstering subscription sales and revenue, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman reports.
Since 2012, the San Jose, California-based Adobe Systems, Inc., has transitioned nearly its entire library of desktop creative applications over to its new cloud-based subscription service, under the terms of which multi-device users are able to access their Adobe professional software from anywhere on their PC, Mac, or compatible mobile device.
Photoshop for iPad, however, will be Adobe’s first full-fledged App Store offering for professional photo editors. The company currently offers its Photoshop Mix app for iOS, but there’s really no comparison between it and the full Photoshop experience.
“My aspiration is to get these on the market as soon as possible,” Adobe’s Chief product officer for Creative Cloud, Scott Belsky, said in an interview with Bloomberg. “There’s a lot required to take a product as sophisticated and powerful as Photoshop and make that work on a modern device like the iPad. We need to bring our products into this cloud-first collaborative era.”
Release Date
While he confirmed Adobe’s ongoing development of Photoshop for iPad, Belsky stopped short of providing additional launch details.
Sources speaking to Bloomberg on condition of anonymity, however, specifically indicated the app is slated for an early 2019 release — assuming all the company’s development goals are met along the way.
Bloomberg’s sources also confirmed that Adobe is planning to unveil its Photoshop for iPad app at its annual MAX creative conference this October.
