Khoi Vinh on the comparative costs of Adobe’s creative tools:

You can argue that Photoshop needs to be bigger because it does so much more, but that is just the point. It does too much for my taste, and I’m a little tired of paying the freight costs of all those features I don’t need: the slowness, the crashes, the progressively exploitive pricing. I’m really enjoying Sketch’s more streamlined feature set, and how it is clearly purpose-built for designing user interfaces. Simpler tools are very often better tools.

When professional designers like Khoi start not only calling Adobe out for the excessive size and cost of its creative tools, but actually switching to alternate applications, you know that change is in the air. The Adobe Creative Cloud is becoming more and more like Microsoft Office every day: Still critical for certain legacy, industry-specific tasks, and increasingly irrelevant beyond that.

I’m beginning to explore new raster and vector illustration apps for my new projects, and it’s entirely possible CS6 is the last version of Photoshop and Illustrator I’ll purchase.

Adobe makes capable tools, but I’m not sure the tenfold increase in cost is matched by a tenfold increase in capability. In this day and age, “we’re the most compatible with legacy industry formats” doesn’t seem like a compelling argument anymore.