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So far I have avoided signing up for Pantone Connect. I think it's a rip-off. They want $180 per year for some digital swatch books? On top of the $200 or so it costs to buy a physical set of Pantone Color Formula Guide swatches? No thanks. Aside from that I've seen all sorts of complaints...

GPL palettes are a GIMP and Inkscape thing. I suppose various fanboys can craft their own custom palettes of Pantone spot colors. But it's going to be their own judgments (or guesses) on RGB-CMYK-L*a*b values with how those palettes work rather than getting the legit values from people at...

I think which ever "decider guy" at Pantone dreamed up this business strategy must have been spending a few nights sleeping in air-tight plastic cleaners bags before fever-dreaming up that ploy. Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator are all very dominant in the specific graphics industry...

All the mergers, buy-outs and monopolization will lead to ever more financial squeezing of end users, customers, etc until we end up in our next great depression. This private equity mindset or ideology that has infected much of the business world knows no sense of balance. These greedy idiots...

Regarding the original first post, the designer who chewed out JBurton should have known better about the Pantone thing a couple of years ago when the first warnings were issued. I made backups of the Pantone ACB files from Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign. Many other Adobe software users did...

Oh yeah. For something that hits closer to home, look at what has been happening to the type industry in recent years. Monotype has been buying up other type foundries for the past 20 years, but their rate of buy-outs has increased noticeably in the past few years. Monotype also bought up the...

Fair comment versus money-making enterprise seems like a pretty clear difference. If you want to create some "fan art" and paint it on the side of your car or house you should be able to do that as long as you're doing that work yourself and not paying someone else to do it. I've heard stories...

No, it's not really all that different of a scenario. If you're selling a decal of a big company logo to a random customer you're the one selling the logo merchandise. Our shop has people coming in from time to time wanting a Harley Davidson logo graphic to stick on something. Or they want some...

Web searches via Google Images is helping get trademark offenders busted. Now these big companies can even use software bots to automatically sniff across the Internet doing image-based searches and compiling hits for possible violations. Visibility on the Internet is how a couple of companies...

Some performance issues with Illustrator can be solved by resetting the AI Preferences file when launching Illustrator. Use these keyboard shortcuts when launching the application, Windows: press and hold Ctrl+Alt-Shift; OSX: press and hold Option+Command+Shift. Doing this will reset the...

A year ago Wacom's tablet driver was really bad about making Illustrator disappear soon after launch. I had to roll back to an older Fall 2022 driver to get the crashes to stop. It took Wacom until around May of 2023 to release a Windows driver that wouldn't crash Illustrator. Graphics card...

It looks like ITC Newtext, severely squeezed before being applied to an arc.

A match plate by itself is strong as hell. The problem is wind transferring its load across a large sign cabinet down to that one single focus point on the overall structure. That point turns into a fulcrum. Wind is already a very powerful force. That force becomes much worse if it can bear down...

My workplace has been building large, lighted pylon signs in-house for several decades. It takes having at least one or more people on staff who can do things like compute a section modulus for a pylon sign design. For signs over 30' tall a lot of towns around here require us to have an...

3mm ACM is a not a load bearing material. Hell, even 6mm ACM isn't for that matter. Enough people have picked on the original poster, but the practices of doing things on the cheap is far too common in our industry. Too many people are "phoning it in" and just do not care at all about the...

I don't think subjective design quality matters all that much to the average person. I've seen customers go through multiple design revisions for a street sign quote from us only for them to turn around and get something cheaper and far more crappy looking. The thing that helps us out over the...

Graphic design is hardly a profession anymore. Anyone with a working pulse and willingness to show up for work on a dependable basis can get hired to do this s#1t (especially if they'll work for cheap). 30 years ago I was proud of having a four year degree from a good NYC art school; now I'm...

Subscription services are not always a bad thing. My bigger concern are these private equity companies and their motives. Computer software such as Canva and Affinity Designer or freaking fonts is just a tiny part of the deal. Private equity companies ruin so much of what they touch. They're...

Smells like more hijinks from the private equity crowd. BTW, much of the developmental funding behind Canva came exactly from private equity firms. It's also interesting that Monotype made a licensing deal with Canva. Monotype is owned by a private equity group and seems to be hell-bent on...

I'd be asking for a copy of the original Photoshop PSD file. Adobe Illustrator is really the only application that can generate a truly edit-friendly PDF, but that's only because it can append actual Illustrator AI data to the PDF. Even with the original PSD file it would be a lucky thing if...