It’s not you, it’s me, Adobe

Why I finally broke up with Adobe

Your design heroes may be Paula Scher or David Carson. Mine is T. Srinivasan.

At a time when Boeing’s planes fall out of the sky, lose doors or leave astronauts stranded in space, I find myself with a newfound respect for robust and functional design, especially of a type known as “withered”. The term was coined (a Mario reference) to describe the design philosophy of Japanese gaming giant, Nintendo. Matthias Ott writes:

While competitors were outdoing each other with the latest hardware features like color displays and computing power, Nintendo focused on providing great gameplay with cheap and readily available technology. Gunpei Yokoi called this philosophy “lateral thinking with withered technology”.

When I lived in Southern India, daily life and rhythms in this part of the country were gently inter-woven with unobtrusive yet high-quality manufactured products that last generations (for instance, stainless steel paraphernalia for filter coffee or silk sarees). I would often see a kind of mass-produced scripture book along with calendars that shopkeepers and homes kept with their shrines. It was stumbling across this report about Srinivasan in the Southern Indian paper of record The Hindu that got me thinking about how these products were designed:

“At the age of 90, T. Srinivasan diligently sits in front of the computer every day, typing in both Sanskrit and Tamil for his next book. He is an expert in agamas (ancient temple rituals and practices). He doesn’t stop with this. He even plans the design and layout of the book. He learnt Adobe Pagemaker at the age of 86 on his own and has been working on it ever since.”

I think about this often: Adobe Pagemaker at the age of 86.

There are two parts to this. The first is that Srinivasan was driven to learn and by his mission despite his age. That is rare and admirable. I sometimes wonder if my work will ever amount to anything as I came to art and design seriously only in my mid-30s. Am I too late? Of course not. As stories like that of T. Srinivasan prove, it’s never too late.

The second is that Adobe Pagemaker belonged to a generation of simple-no drama to use “desktop publishing” software…