The Hickensian is the journal of Jon Hicks of Hicksdesign. Will code for cheese

When I started freelancing eleven years ago, 80% of my work was print design, and I needed to equip myself with the right software. Quark XPress was still the daddy as far as desktop publishing was concerned, so it was a necessary purchase. It cost the princely sum of £995. A single application just shy of a grand!

In contrast, I also bought an Adobe bundle of Photoshop 5, InDesign 2, Illustrator 10 and Acrobat for £680. Back then, Adobe was the good guy, the saviour, bringing a Quark alternative that was better and didn’t need a mortgage to buy it.

That view of Adobe has deteriorated over the years however. It’s felt more and more like paying for bug fixes and unnecessary features. To minimise this I always skip a major release of Creative Suite and I’m currently on CS5. Illustrator is my most-used tool, but I get frustrated on a daily basis at stupid bugs like stray or ghost pixels. I haven’t upgraded to CS6 yet as an important feature has been removed from Ai – exporting to SVG in the Save for Web dialog. If I set up an Iconset with slices, I want to be able to export both PNG and SVG, so this is crucial.

Now, Adobe have decided to stop selling Creative Suite as either a download or physical disk and move to a subscription-based service, ‘Creative Cloud’. You can see the attraction for Adobe, as it makes them more money and presumably makes it harder to pirate.

I mentioned on Twitter that this is making me rant. Here’s why…

• At £46.88 a month this costs £562.56 a year, roughly what I was paying for an upgrade every three years. My normal strategy of upgrading every other major release isn’t going to work anymore.
• Apps are available individually for around £15 a month, but this isn’t cost-effective for 2-3 apps. Likewise, the standard monthly cost feels like paying for a lot of apps I will never use.
• If I stop paying my monthly ‘rent’, I can no longer open files created in those apps.
• I’m not interested in all the add-on features like the cloud storage, after all that’s what I have Dropbox for.

In my opinion, this move hurts people like freelance print designers more than me. While I have other options to Illustrator and Photoshop, there are none for InDesign. Unless you count Quark Xpress – the best price for which is £858. Still putting Adobe’s costs into perspective.

What it comes down to is this: I don’t want to rent the tools I use for work. So while Adobe is going this direction, I’ll be going another. I’ll continue to use the CS5 tools I’ve paid for, but I’ll be using Mac native alternatives even more keenly. Instead of Photoshop, I already use Acorn, and instead of Fireworks and Illustrator I’ll be using Sketch.app more. That’s for another post though…

My copy of Offscreen #5 arrived this week and it looks (and smells!) absolutely gorgeous. As always its a great read and I’m dead chuffed at how well “Al Power’s”: photos have come out. Obviously they couldn’t use all of the shots that Al took, so I’ve put up an Offscreen Photoset on Flickr to show the best of the bunch, most of which weren’t published.

I’ll stop banging on about it now, promise.

Buy Offscreen Magazine here

I’ll leave you with this delightful gif made from outtakes from the shoot, which I shall simply call ‘Bike Dance‘…

Ever since I got into cycling, I’ve been aware that I’ve enjoyed tinkering and fettling bikes as much as riding them. I’m never satisfied with stock bikes, and love to customise and try out different parts where I can. Like Arthur Weasley, I’m happiest in the shed.

So far, I’ve picked up what I can from manuals, guides on the internet and just trying things, but there are an awful lot of holes in my education. I also want to be able to setup and service my bikes as much as I can, which is where a new co-operative in Oxford called The Broken Spoke comes in.

The Co-op door

Setup in 2012 by Cassiope Sydoriak, Elle Smith and Will McCallum, and based in workshops that are part of the Oxford Story Museum , they have laudable aims:

1. Teach bicycle maintenance classes that are fairly-priced, convenient, and accessible to everyone
2. Bring people together to ride and repair bicycles
3. Provide specific activities and training for vulnerable members of our community and those under-represented in cycling
4. Create training, volunteer, and employment opportunities for a new generation of bicycle mechanics
5. Support the growth of a “fix it, don’t throw it away” mentality within the cycling community
6. Do business in a sustainable way that strengthens our community

I’ve now completed two bike workshops there and can highly recommend them! The first course was Wheel Building back in February (Flickr Set here), where we learned how to lace and true a wheel. Topics like dishing and spoke length were also covered, and after spending 2 hours trying to true a wheel, I appreciate the skill involved even more.

Hubs, spokes and nipples

It was hard work, but I’ve now been able to true the rear wheel ‘enough’. I went with Cyclox Chairman, James Styring who wrote about the experience for The Oxford Times. Tech geek? I’ll have words…

I then went back for a second course, the two-part External Mechanics Intensive (Wheels, Brakes, Chains and Gears) with chum Matt Hamm. In both courses, the workshop leaders were fantastic, and numbers are kept low so that there is enough one-on-one time. This means you can get specific instructions on your particular bike and its components, rather than just generic instructions. I’ve learnt a lot and keen to go back for more.

Matt and I removing sprockets

As well as the specific bike courses, they run an open workshop every Saturday from 12–6pm. You can come and use their extensive tool collection, and get advice and help from volunteer experts hanging around.

The co-op is a triumph!

Sorry, couldn’t resist a photo of my singlespeed outside the Pembroke Street entrance…

I’m very chuffed to say that Issue 5 of the gorgeous Offscreen Magazine is now available to be pre-ordered and it features an interview with me! You can see me in the sample spread above, resplendent in my special ‘webmaster’ lab coat that I wear to work. What’s more, I get to be in the same issue as these fantastic people:

In our fifth issue we speak to Mac-app and iOS-game designer Neven Mrgan, entrepreneur and body-hacker Ryan Carson, mobile photography enthusiast Jessica Zollman, icon design maestro Jon Hicks, the CEO of dorm-room startup Squarespace, Anthony Casalena, and Malaysian-American web designer and avid cyclist Naz Hamid.

All the photographs for my interview were taken in February by my friend Al Power on what was easily the darkest and coldest day of the year. It’s a testament to his skill that that they look so good!

Pre-order Issue 5 here