I finally did it! Last week I downgraded Adobe Creative Cloud to just their Adobe Illustrator plan. New artificial intelligence features don’t really interest me, and subscription software is no longer providing me with good value for money. In all honesty I didn’t need the full repertoire of Adobe apps on my laptop anyway. I was only using a handful of them on a daily basis. So I’ll be grateful of the £35 per month cost saving.

For me, Affinity Publisher replaced InDesign sometime ago. Affinity Photo now replaces Photoshop. I paid a one-off license fee for the current suite of Affinity apps, which includes Windows and iPad versions as well as the MacOS ones.

iMovie is my current substitute for Adobe Premiere. Especially after I recently discovered that I can edit and create portrait videos using the New App Preview option in the MacOS version – who knew!? Plus I can always purchase Apple’s Final Cut Pro if I find I have a need to create more complex video compositions again.

A 20 year old MacBook with an ancient version of AfterEffects that I bought years ago, has been fired up. Both perfectly adequate for me to use, and will enable me to create the basic animations that I generally require. However I’m also playing around with the beta of an open source app called Friction, which looks like being a great AfterEffects alternative.

In summary, as well as saving me cash, this decision has suddenly made work feel fresh and exciting again. Two jobs for different clients over the past week have required me to approach my work in new ways, without compromising the quality of design that I provide. Learning and discovering alternative processes in how to do things digitally certainly stimulates my mind more than AI does. Who said that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks?