Can You Make a Living with Adobe Creative Cloud?

In 2017, the Computer History Museum held the Desktop Publishing Pioneer Meeting. In “Session 9: Impact and Future of Desktop Publishing,” the following exchange occurs.1 Emphasis added is my own.

First, some notes to contextualize the speakers:

John Warnock: Co-founder, former president, and former CEO of Adobe. Developed PostScript and other foundational Adobe technologies
Jonathan Seybold: Publisher of “The Seybold Report,” a newsletter that reported on developing technologies within computing, desktop publishing, and the early web
Burton Grad: Moderator
John Schoch: Computer scientist who worked at Xerox PARC through the 1970s and ’80s

Now, the conversation from the Desktop Publishing Pioneer Meeting: Day 2 Session 9: Impact and future of Desktop Publishing - May 23, 2017:

John Warnock: I’d like to ask Jonathan a question. In the 1983 timeframe, my count on the number of graphic artists in the U.S. was like 275,000, something like that. Do you know what the number was?
Jonathan Seybold: I don’t know. That seems like a likely number, but I don’t recall any independent verification of it.
Warnock: The Adobe creative suite currently has an installed base of what, eight million?
Grad: Worldwide.
Warnock: Yes.
Grad: Paying seats.
Grad: Who are they?
Warnock: Everybody.
(group laughter)
Grad: Give me some examples.
Warnock: Well, it turns out it turns out that the desktop publishing revolution has empowered ordinary mortals to be incredibly creative. In the old days, when the 275,000 number was there, you had to be really good with a rapidograph pen. You had to be really good at a waxer. You had to have an intimate relationship with a typeset or service bureau. You had to cut out a lot of paper. You had to paste it on a lot of cardboard. That was the population who could do graphic arts.

What Warnock is describing about “the old days” is a professionalized system of labor. Graphic designers, he says, needed explicit technical skills. There was an “intimate relationship” between the designer and the production team. Service bureaus conducted pre-press operations (including “stripping in” images and creating color separations). Each stage of production was handled by a different technician.

A diagram from Reproduction Photography for Lithography, written by Eric Chambers and published by the Graphic Arts Technical Foundation in 1979, gives a suggested model for how to organize this system of labor within a single building.2 Design, artwork, and photography are placed on the top floor, right next to management. The system continues down towards the warehouse, through cameras, assembly, platemaking, and printing. While this isn’t an organizational chart per se, it places graphic designers in a middle management position between upper management and production technicians. In the desktop publishing model, the designer began absorbing many of the jobs that sat on those lower floors, including typesetting.

Suggested layout for 5 floors and basement building, from Reproduction Photography for Lithography.

Warnock also emphasizes the manual labor of design, arguing implicitly that desktop publishing has freed the designer from the hassles of glue, paper, pens, and complex manual equipment. Later in the conversation, the speakers return to the topic:

John Schoch: I am intrigued by the statistic that there were 247,000 or whatever professional graphics people some time ago and there are 8 million today. There were 250,000 professionals making a living at it. Today we have eight million people who are users of Adobe’s creative suite, but does that mean there’s a lot fewer than 247,000 professionals who do it for a living?
Unidentified Speaker: There are a lot more professionals making a living.
Schoch: That’s good to know.

What does it mean to “do it for a living?” Graphic design as a hobby or independent creative practice is certainly legitimate and worthwhile. But the unidentified speaker says there are “a lot more professionals making a living.” To me, “doing it for a living” means that design or its related labor is a primary source of income that covers costs related housing, healthcare, bills, taxes, etc. As noted earlier, Adobe had 8 million “paying seats” in 2017. A paying seat is an individual subscription license to use the software. There are surely many people using the software through illicit means or institutional computers for which there are multiple users. Are there, in fact, 8 million graphics professionals making a living? Certainly not. I’m not even sure Adobe would argue that their goal is to create a worldwide class of graphics professionals. Instead, they frequently emphasize that their products “unleash creativity.”3

What, then, is the average income of one of those professionals? Let’s use illustrators as a subset of the field, both because it is my central concern and because it allows us to understand some particular precarities. The State of Illustration Survey, published in 2020, provides us a useful snapshot.4 The survey found that the 2018 median income of US-based full-time Illustrators was $53,251.90. By 2020, that number inched up to $56.8k.

Prior to 2020, that statistic disproportionately applies to male-identifying illustrators. In 2019, for example, male-identifying illustrators reported a median of $45,102.86. Female-identifying illustrators earned a median of $22,831.82 in 2019, about $1,000 more in 2020. Non-binary/Trans-identifying illustrators earned a median of $9,168.65 in 2019 and about $11.5k in 2020. Those who identified as LBTQ+ earned a median of $20k in 2019 and $21.3k in 2020. Disabled illustrators earned a median of $10.6k in 2019 and $12.6k in 2020. Again, all of these respondents say they are “full-time” illustrators. Are they “doing it for a living”? In terms of their labor, yes. Economically, absolutely not.

Zooming out from the profession, the 2020 U.S. census reported that the median income for full-time, year-round workers was $56,287, down from $58,173 in 2019.5 So, only male-identifying respondents even approach the national median income. Pay inequality is stark along the lines of gender, disability, and queer identities.

Still, the heart of the question is whether the system of labor illustrators work within supports their livelihood. Almost half of respondents in the State of Illustration survey said that they had support from a spouse, family member, or friend. Over two-thirds said they did not earn enough to sustain a “comfortable lifestyle.” So, are illustrators “doing it for a living” under the Adobe subscription model? No. Not even close.

As practitioners, I think we feel these numbers intuitively. The statistics are mostly useful in refuting the arguments of those who claim that digital design products have democratized the profession or allowed more people entry-level access to the trade. Yes, digital tools for creative expression are more widely used than they were in the early ’80s. Warnock says that “the desktop publishing revolution empowered ordinary mortals to be incredibly creative.” But what good is that creativity if it can’t pay the bills?

Note: If you know of statistics detailing salaries in the graphic arts in the 1980s, please send them my way at njodice@gmail.com.

  1. Transcript available at www.computerhistory.org/collections/catalog/102738560. Video available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y6wziJQKu7M&list=PLQsxaNhYv8dbM6UEW7k9TCWjnM7FigU_d&index=8 ↩

  2. Eric Chambers, Reproduction Photography for Lithography (Pittsburgh, 1979), 21. ↩

  3. See this webinar, for instance ↩

  4. Darren Di Lieto, “State of Illustration,” PDF, 2021. ↩

  5. See Table A-6 ↩