Is Adobe Originals closing down?

To expand on my post: Robert is pretty close to retirement age and has long been conflicted between his desire to produce work to his own high standards and the fact that the work makes him somewhat miserable. There have always been projects he wants to do (and re-do), which has made it hard for him to just walk away. To make matters worse, he’s often been pulled off his own work to fulfill other requests (e.g. Adobe Clean).

My primary complaint about this situation is how Adobe is simply cutting him loose, rather than crafting a more graceful retirement. Personally, I think it show’s a lack of respect for someone who has had a long, storied career and, in a small way, put Adobe on the map. Some might say he wouldn’t have ever voluntarily retired, but now we’ll never know.

There are still some great designers working on the Type team, along with other dedicated staff. One could reasonably say the Adobe Originals program can live on through them, but I think that really depends on management, since the program has always been about dedicated resources and marketing — and I’m not optimistic about either.

With all due respect to Robert and Carol and everyone who made contributions over the years, I could argue that the Originals program was somewhat tainted in the ’90s when the “Adobe Originals” brand was slapped on some dubious, ephemeral typefaces. Later, at some point the Originals name was repurposed as the name for anything in the Adobe-owned type library*, and not the previously-designated set of typefaces, which further undermined the brand.

(* I was there when this happened and I remember not feeling great about the idea, but at the time it didn’t seem like there were good alternatives. I believe it occurred around the time we started distributing Adobe-owned fonts through Fontspring and Typekit.)

Anyhow, my point is that Adobe Originals has lost much of its original luster, so if Adobe doesn’t want to make original Western typefaces anymore, it feels like it’s time to close the book on it. That makes me a little sad because it’s been very important to me in many ways, but all things must pass.

Anyone who has worked with Robert knows he can be very difficult — but there’s no denying he’s a driven, committed artist. He has other (non-type) outlets for that which make him happy, so I’ll be very surprised if we see any more type from him, but time will tell.