‘Abode’ Comes After Adobe With Creative Apps That Don’t Need ‘Rent’

To continue working every month, creatives have to take out a chunk of their expenses to keep their software running. This hasn’t always been the case. In the past, professionals just had to pay an upfront fee.

You might recall Stuart Semple from his endeavors to “liberate” gridlocked colors. He first retaliated against Anish Kapoor’s claim of exclusive rights to Vantablack by developing a “blackest black” paint anybody could buy. Then, he responded to brands with a usable ‘Tiff Blue’, an ‘Easy Klein’, and more. Semple also created a “pinkest pink,” “yellowest yellow,” “whitest white,” and “greenest green.”

Then, when Adobe paywalled PANTONEs in Photoshop, the British artist rolled out ‘FREETONEs’, a collection of 1,280 “liberated” hues that creatives could obtain at no cost by installing a plugin.

Now, the artist is going up against the entire creativity suite with ‘Abode’, a new “home for creatives”—hence the moniker—filled with “world-class design and photography tools, with an uncanny similarity to the tools you’ve been indoctrinated in.”

“For a long time, we owned the software we used. Sadly, that is a thing of the past,” Semple details. “We now rent the tools of our trade.” Now, he says, the landlords can raise the rent as they wish.

The Abode suite, described as a new forever home for creatives, promises a lifetime of free updates. It will include apps like ‘ONdesign’ (a familiar and fully featured desktop publishing application), an ‘illustrateIT’ vector drawing and illustration software, a photo-editing tool called ‘photoPOP’, and a “super-fast mobile app” called ‘Impress’ that’s “full of templates.”

The programs will run on Mac and PC, with the mobile-based Impress usable on Android and iOS.

Abode isn’t ready yet, and Semple has set up a Kickstarter campaign to get additional backing. However, he points out that money isn’t the only thing the project needs. Although he’s pooled together a team of “geeks” with over 90 years of combined experience in software development to design the suite, he also calls upon the community to help perfect the software by completing surveys, testing features, and giving feedback.

Abode will support “all the file formats you’d expect,” including, presumably, Adobe file types like .psd. It will also be packed with color palettes creatives are familiar with and love.

Further, users won’t be “held hostage to a cloud to store [their] files,” according to Semple, as Abode will sync with Dropbox, iCloud, Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud, and more.

The crowd-sourcing initiative has over a month to go before its deadline, but it’s already exceeded its funding goal. Clearly, creatives are eager for a change.

[via PetaPixel and Culture Hustle / Kickstarter, images via Culture Hustle]