Is Adobe Originals closing down?

mitradranirban · June 1

Adobe is sacking Robert Slimbach who is just near his retirement.
https://typo.social/@slye/114603402101358430
Is Adobe going to replace original design with AI designed typefaces in future?

Aaron Bell · June 1

I don’t get the sense that their goal is to replace original type design with AI type design but this is rather a recognition that Adobe Originals served its purpose and is no longer a differentiator that drives sales of Adobe products. They have so many high quality fonts from so many different foundries (and getting more all the time) that they don’t need to continue producing new ones themselves.

There could also be some interest in AI lettering, but that wouldn’t really compete with what Slimbach brought to the table, at least at this point.

Igor Freiberger · June 1

But Slye didn't say anything about AI. This is a speculation from another user. I don't think Adobe will adopt this path since it damages Adobe Type as a product.

Nick Shinn · June 1

People may speculate about his “retirement,” but has he actually announced any farewell tours yet?

I wouldn’t be surprised if he has a few ideas for typefaces that weren’t quite right for the Adobe brand, but would like to develop, perhaps for another foundry, or even his own indie outfit.

John Butler · June 1

My favorite recent design of his is Ten Roman, particularly its italic, somewhere in his design continuum between Arno and Brioso. I also dig the new Adobe Aldine and Adobe Text. Such understated names, such little fanfare, such hidden treasures. I hope he’s at least measurably rich from all of this, if only in Adobe stock options. Perhaps like Zapf he has plenty more output left to release.

Thomas Phinney · June 2

I am sure he did OK financially. Adobe pays decently.

Joshua Langman · June 2

And Adobe Kis. Agreed, Slimbach/Adobe have been very quietly releasing some masterpieces recently. It's a shame they no longer seem to provide printable PDF specimens — just very tall, narrow, single-page specimens that cannot usefully be printed and do not even have a full showing of characters.

Thomas Phinney · June 3

(I wanted to say some more here, just been busy with some family medical stuff....)

Robert Slimbach is one of the greatest living masters of type design. He is passionate about his craft, and one can learn a lot by studying his work.

I have been wanting to spend some quality time with Adobe Aldine, maybe this will be an impetus to do so.

Christopher Slye · June 4

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.

Nick Shinn · June 4

The great thing about being one’s own boss is that there is no “retirement age.”

John Hudson · June 4

conflicted between his desire to produce work to his own high standards and the fact that the work makes him somewhat miserable

That sound horribly familiar.

Dave Crossland · June 13

I often tell type tourists (like big co executives

that one has to be extremely picky in temperament to be a professional type designer, to care passionately about tiny details that are imperceptible to the average non-typographically-trained person (like themselves), and extremely tenacious to keep at it for years, and even within a single project to keep at it despite the monotony of many tasks involved - and this does not always coincide with an extremely patient temperament... sometimes just the opposite when it comes to things that are not drawing type, like putting up with their, ah, corporate communications style.

John Butler · June 14

The Macromedia merger was the worst thing that happened to Adobe. It has been rippling outwards ever since.

Christopher Slye · June 15

Care to elaborate?

John Butler · June 15

It’s probably largely subjective on my part: one’s favorite music remains the stuff one listened to in high school and college, which might as well be an adaptation of Goudy’s quote. But after the Macromedia merger, the separation between television screens as a vehicle for advertising bombardment and computer screens as a vehicle for focused work just seemed to weaken. I still regard the old Adobe as a force for wringing beautiful, permanent things out of technology, and Macromedia Adobe as a force for wringing cash out of creative people, and wringing attention out of idle minds. Adobe always seemed to be the highest-minded major software company. Smaller companies like DecoType arguably have more global impact per dollar spent, but Adobe’s technology is still at the foundation.

It could have been worse. It could have been Symantec.

John Hudson · June 15

I don’t know enough about Macromedia to judge whether the merger is the turning point or catalyst for where Adobe has been heading for the past few years, or whether this is simply what happens when the visionary and innovative founders of a successful company step back from the running of it and the mere businessmen take the reins.

John Butler · June 15

Warnock and Geschke stepped back in the early 2000s before the Macromedia merger. Those guys were engineers and scientists who won patents. Conversely, if there was a single Macromedia C-level executive at the time who could identify a typeface on sight, I’d love to know his/her name. Macromedia was simply a different company with a different vision, and their product portfolio diluted and weakened Adobe’s. So yes, perhaps other slightly earlier events paved the way for the Macromedia merger and were the true catalysts.

Geschke: bachelor’s in classics, master’s in mathematics, PhD in computer science.

Warnock: bachelor’s in mathematics and philosophy, PhD in electrical engineering.

Macromedia founder Bud Colligan: bachelor’s in economics, Stanford MBA. He was doubtless a smart guy, apparently behind Apple’s prescient Knowledge Navigator concept from 1986. I remember having the issue of Byte with the glossy fold-out Apple ad showcasing this clunky proto-iPad at the time, with ITC Garamond Condensed body text. But Geschke and Warnock were simply different kinds of men than the Macromedia folks.

Christopher Slye · June 15

I agree with at least some of that. There’s no doubt Adobe has changed a lot, for whatever reason. By the time I (and Thomas) got there, the Originals program was no longer Adobe’s cash cow, and had become a relatively small department wrapped together with PostScript and other “legacy” technologies (a.k.a. “print products”) that were important in their way, but no longer the business focus. Adobe Originals was about to become the vehicle for OpenType and all the text layout machinery in products like InDesign, Illustrator, Acrobat, etc., not a product in and of itself. New typefaces still happened, but clearly the company didn’t see them as anything worth talking about in any substantial way.

I think one could debate Macromedia as cause or effect. Everyone saw money in the emerging web, but it was also where the “creatives” were going. At the time it seemed like a very sensible direction for Adobe, but of course nowadays I’m not at all happy with the company’s priorities and pine for the good old days as much as anyone.

By the way, the Typekit acquisition (which coincided with the Creative Cloud rollout) was an incredible time for type at Adobe compared to the previous 10+ years. After languishing for so long, suddenly everyone around the company was interested in type, and it was fun and satisfying to suddenly have a voice in product decisions and the general strategy. That didn’t last too long, but it was a pleasant change for a while. It was probably not so much fun for Robert because it didn’t really change how original type design was treated, but I think it did keep the Originals program alive for a while longer than it otherwise would have.

John Butler · June 15

I have unusual tastes and preferences—for example, I believe sans serif type is part of the feedback loop of civilizational decline—so I won’t claim to tell anyone how to run a company. I just miss how Adobe was run at one time, and Slimbach’s design was its flagship product for me.

Is Adobe Originals closing down?

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