Most designers have a love-hate relationship with Adobe Acrobat and PDF. They know they have to use it but often they see it as a threat to their livelihoods. That’s certainly the feedback Eric J. Adams’s column, “Profit from PDF?” drew a few months back.
The general perception is that PDF cuts designers out of the process. If an untrained administrative assistant can create a document in Microsoft Word and then save it as a PDF, what role does a designer have in this workflow? As one respondent to Adams’s column wrote: “Acrobat Reader users don’t need any special skills and that is what is so appealing about .pdf files. Unfortunately this type of consumer-based software lowers the bar on design and production, quality and professionalism.”
But the irony is that Acrobat was created to give designers more control over their documents. The main idea behind Acrobat was to preserve context — the visual presentation of documents — as well as content. The alternatives at the time — .txt or .html files — strip the page layout of non-generic fonts and images in order to ensure compatibility with the receiving application. PDF files, on the other hand, retained the designer’s intended formatting.
In other words, in a world that increasingly emphasized distribution over design, PDF was to be the designer’s friend. And over the years Adobe continued to add features that addressed designers’ concerns, such as Pantone spot-color support. Clearly its creators saw Acrobat as a necessary part of the designer’s toolbox.
So how did this animosity come to be? And more importantly, what can be done about it?
Corporate Mission
For years Acrobat was a product in search of an audience. When it was introduced 10 years ago, no one but Adobe co-founder John Warnock really recognized its potential. In the early ’90s, designers were still getting used to the idea that you could accomplish with Photoshop on a personal computer what was formerly only possible with $50,000 workstations and proprietary software. At the dawn of the Internet age few designers cared about virtual publishing via the bit-stream. So Adobe began pushing Acrobat as a corporate tool, a magic portal into the mythical land of the paperless office. That approach gradually struck home, and Acrobat has been comfortably ensconced in corporate America ever since.
As a result designers were skeptical about the impact of PDF on their livelihoods — after all it was just a shell that contained basic corporate communications. But as new publishing features were added, and as Acrobat Reader became a de facto standard for reading now-ubiquitous PDF files, designers wised up. PDF wasn’t going away and indeed clients requested it as a deliverable.
Today designers realize they need to have rudimentary Acrobat skills — at a minimum, distilling a file for review and output — but I don’t know that many who tap into its full potential as a necessary piece of the design arsenal. “Designers think of Acrobat as nothing more than StuffIt Deluxe for their files,” concurs David Zwang, a publishing-industry consultant who specializes in PDF-based workflows. “Adobe hasn’t done a great job of educating designers about what PDF can do for them.”
Niche Market
In its push to market PDF as the solution for document creation and distribution in the enterprise, Adobe has tended to overlook the design community as a customer of its Acrobat products. These days, believe it or not, design and publishing is a niche market — a very large and lucrative one, but a niche nonetheless. Sales of software to designers slow as the creative-professional market matures. Today it’s not Photoshop that drives Adobe’s bottom line, but Acrobat. More specifically, it’s Acrobat running under Windows in large corporations and government agencies. Mac-loving, upgrade-buying creative professionals do not represent a significant slice of Adobe’s revenue pie chart.
But creative professionals are an important part of Adobe’s customer base. If Acrobat and PDF represent Adobe’s future, then the company needs to do more to bring creative professionals along. Today’s Illustrator user is tomorrow’s Acrobat customer, after all. PDF needs to be viewed not as the enemy of creative work but a facilitator. Creative professionals praise Adobe at length for its integrated product strategy — the cohesive look and feel, software interoperability, and so on — but PDF is the lynchpin that holds the products together. Adobe needs to better communicate this to a design community that often feels at odds with Acrobat’s corporate imperative.
It’s pretty straightforward: Whether you produce pages in InDesign, sketch drawings in Illustrator, edit images in Photoshop, or design Web pages in GoLive, you can save your work as a PDF. Better yet, you can add hyperlinks, collaborate on documents with colleagues, add security features that prevent others from stealing your work, and much more. Maybe you can’t design a page in Acrobat, but you can make sure the page you do design isn’t messed with. That, to me, is really cool and very important. So why isn’t that message drummed into designers’ heads?
Make It Clear
I think Adobe needs to tweak its marketing strategy so that designers better understand the role PDF plays. For the past few years “network publishing” has been Adobe’s mantra. The idea of a publishing utopia in which richly formatted documents are communicated anytime and anywhere is compelling, but it hasn’t caught fire. And in today’s economic climate, designing video for cell phones doesn’t seem as urgent a task as simply keeping your head above water. Even though PDF is at the heart of network publishing, it gets lost in the mix.
I suggest a slight shift of messaging. Instead of focusing on the process, focus on the technology. The Adobe brand needs to be synonymous with PDF. Simply put: Adobe is the PDF company.
There is a precedent for this kind of messaging. In its early years, Adobe’s mission was clearly defined: sell PostScript. Everything the company did — from printers to fonts to applications — was in the service of PostScript. That one technology provided a unifying principle for Adobe, even as it began to embrace new markets like digital imaging and desktop video (where PostScript played a minimal role, but somehow it all made sense). Such single-mindedness allowed Adobe to sell PostScript controllers to Hewlett-Packard and thus gain entry to corporate America, as well as to develop RIPs for Linotype who sold imagesetters to the print shops that served creative professionals. PostScript spanned a broad customer base. The message was that the technology is big enough to support many types of users.
That’s true of Acrobat, too. In fact, PDF is derived from PostScript, so it makes perfect sense to draw on that rich heritage to sell the future. The message is ultimately the same: Whether you create corporate forms or design four-color magazines, Adobe Acrobat and PDF help you do your job better. Now that’s something creative professionals can relate to.
Read more by Pamela Pfiffner.
This article was last modified on January 3, 2023
This article was first published on January 9, 2003
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