Creative Tool Race Hots Up

A high-tech showdown and big investment leads to excitement in the market

A market that’s bubbling with excitement, growth and serious investment has emerged following over a decade of domination by a single player. In only the past 6 months, over $200m of combined venture capital investment has been pumped into InVision, Figma, Abstract and Bohemian. Other established players including Corel and Serif (Europe) have recently unveiled the fruits of significant product investment.

The design software and creative workflow markets are sectors that have never been so vibrant and full of potential. Typically, with a common central theme of vector drawing power — pixels are so 1999 — many recent headlines have been stolen by the focus on UI and UX creatives. In turn, this has spurred Adobe on to not only produce a ground-up new product in XD, but also a sea-change on product team philosophy with a strong dependence on 3rd party developers.

This groundswell has ensured an overall push in developing vector software for a wider range of vertical markets; this is also something that will become more of a necessity as relative newcomers hunt down the next areas of growth. Even with the mobile design app market gaining a stronger foothold against the traditional heavyweight desktop apps, a consideration for every niche is an inevitability to justify the massive investments taking place.

All to play for

All this activity has resulted in a fascinating race where the winner takes all. The long-standing overlord of all things creative software, Adobe, is not looking to lose significant ground without a fight. Having seen Adobe up-close for over ten years, it’s as if a lightning bolt has woken the behemoth from its slumber, making it potentially more dangerous than ever for its foe. Interestingly, it has chosen not to use its supreme legal potential with an arsenal of patents to challenge all those who challenge it.

Rather, the more courageous route of innovation and damn hard work is Adobe’s current weapon of choice, as witnessed in the supercharged drive to make its XD package overbearing in the UI and UX market. This drive can be traced all the way back to a belief from the top as highlighted by Adobe’s Chief Product Officer, Scott Belsky:

…I firmly believe that XD will one day be as important a product as Photoshop.

That’s a brave statement from a company which has made its long-standing crown jewel creative software a household name. And a very effective cash cow along the way.

To Adobe’s advantage, the reinvention approach will position it very well for many years to come, with the huge investment in new and modern-thinking core technology and philosophies spilling over into other teams.

The accumulated effort and resources focused on this particular vertical market appears potentially disproportionate whilst its stalwart vector product, Illustrator, is kept in the background to fight off the renewed flank attacks by Serif and Corel. Even though, it’s impossible to write Adobe’s 30+ year old product off as it’s the entrenched cornerstone of a vast swathe of workflows — and it’s already proven adept to winning wars over its existence.

The root cause

It’s no coincidence that Adobe’s initiatives only took place following Bohemian’s growing penetration of the market with its Sketch software, recently revealed to have exceeded one million paying customers.

Having wisely chosen to retreat from its original seemingly wider remit of all things vector design, the concentration on UI and UX workflows emerged. Even if a vital missing component — Windows compatibility — didn’t, which is likely to restrain it potential over the coming years.

As if a beacon to the cause, it’s likely that Bohemian’s success spurred on other suitors to the market including InVision, Figma, Framer, et al. Causing an initial fragmentation in user loyalty between factions, it will likely be a situation that clarifies over the coming few years. It’s easy to suggest the obvious names who will be declared champions, but this is a story that will have more twists and turns to come than a Netflix thriller boxset.

One thing is for certain; funding is king. The financial arsenal chosen by the contenders includes existing deep pockets, venture capital, investment funds and bootstrap. Any hiccup in funding streams for companies which are yet to balance the books would likely be fatal for world domination plans.

Support act

With the battle royale taking form, every advantage needs to be discovered and acted on.

Some interesting trends have already emerged. First up, is the return to form of wooing the potential customers with traditional and proven interaction. Naturally, we’re looking at a vast array of online tools including social media, webinars and the like. But it’s the physical meetings, promotions, workshops and (whisper it) user groups that pleasantly surprises the most. For all the love of things internet in Silicon Valley, a significant value is still being placed on human interactions. This demonstrates hope for humanity.

A second approach is to encourage products to grow with the help of external developers. For years, major software products have provided a level of extensibility, be it Firefox with its extensions, Illustrator with its plugins. And now Bohemian’s Sketch and Adobe XD with its plugins. The trick is in gathering support acts to produce the additional tools whilst nurturing a warm, loving, fuzzy feeling in its legions of developers required to make it effective.

This approach is vital to bringing speedy feature sets to a demanding userbase. It allows the major developers to concentrate on the underlying quality of speed of the application whilst orbiting scaled-down developers can fill in the current gaps.

Astute Graphics has been very successfully growing its business for 12+ years purely on the basis of giving the answers to the army of millions of designers who found the native tools lacking-focus | hard-to-use | missing (*delete as appropriate). Astute Graphics proves that it’s possible to both deliver the solutions that keeps a user loyal and allows for the growth of a $1m+ turnover thriving business.

To attract extension developers to a new ecosystem, in addition to a userbase size warranting investment, the major developers need to produce the mechanisms (“APIs”), clear documentation and support to allow the smaller developers to thrive. This is where it gets very interesting with the state-of-play here and now.

The clear current leader is Adobe with a very strong emphasis and proactive approach with their XD plugin environment. In a single year, a welcome glut of regional and international plugin developer events has been hosted by Adobe. But with Bohemian, Figma and InVision increasingly adopting this real-world hand-holding for its developer community, how long Adobe’s lead will be maintained is an interesting question.

Things got even more interesting at the end of 2017 when InVision rightly trumpeted a new funding initiative for those looking to bolster its ecosystem. Using $5m of, presumably Venture Capital finance, it stole a march for practical and PR purposes. With flag proudly raised above the parapet, it was only a short time before the return salvo flew in from Adobe with a $10m fund becoming available to kick-start the support and affection towards XD plugin development. Adobe seems to be on the backfoot, but unnervingly for its competitors, that foot is Michael Jordan super-sized.

A toolbox to bypass the opposition

So, you’re a company who’s gambled tens of millions on the latest and greatest vector-based design tool. Your original market analysis now resembles a lost paradise of manageable competition. The development of worthy but not exactly ground-breaking features such as a user interface has drained about 237% more resources than originally anticipated.

Worst still, investors are crying out for that special advantage. The original USPs are now looking distinctly last-year and the growing userbase keeps on clamouring for features which were always on the horizon. Such as the ability to draw more than mere ellipses and rounded rectangles.

It’s now that the reality of building core drawing functions appears excessively onerous.

Does this scenario sound familiar? Unfortunately, it’s the stage many developers are now finding themselves in, including Adobe. The apparent simple requests such as long shadow tools are way more complex than originally thought. To make these, you need to have access to some pretty special underlying math. Math which, at a cursory glance, is available through several well-worn public academic papers scribed decades ago. Math which proves to only be an indicator of direction. The devil is turning out to be in the detail.

This is where the revolutionary Astui technology is breaking ground. With no concern for creating major packages or specific design sectors, Astui is that essential off-the-shelf toolbox for those who have been looking to break into the market or get a new angle — Corel’s new web-based CorelDRAW.app being a perfect example — to stick.

It’s so simple in principle. Let all the hard math and magic take place as a service remotely. All the creative software need do is to send over the shape to be manipulated along with the basic recipe of what the user wants to do.

Need that long shadow added to the text? No problem. Just send over the outline of the text, how long you want the shadow to be and the angle. Astui will obediently return the result. This is already being delivered in XD, Illustrator and Sketch with new Astui plugins.

Extend this principle to a whole wealth of commonly required but seriously hard operations such as adding shapes together, offsetting a curve and artwork optimization, and you get the foundations necessary to keep customers happy.

Advantages are numerous: the processor-intensive work takes place in the cloud (saving battery life); the tools can be added in days rather than years; deployment is possible anywhere; the results benefit from over six years of intensive development; the recipe approach allows innovative new creative solutions to be developed quickly.

And when web access is limited, or the latency of Cloud services is not suitable? Simple. The core Astui technology can be licensed so that it’s deployed locally on desktop, mobile and other devices.

That is why Astute Graphics looks forward to revealing our first licensees in 2019. It’s the openness of the service that’s been the greatest driver allowing interested parties to fully sample and test innovative solutions without barriers leading to an accelerated rate of adoption. In turn, there’s a shorter wait before creatives can finally make fuller choices in cementing their workflow tools without compromise of the basics.

Stage two is to ensure that all major potential uses Astui such as Digital Asset Management (DAM), vector stock libraries and document processors also take advantage of document optimization and human-editability that Astui brings. It’s a technology that has been forged for the industry drama laying ahead.

Nicholas van der Walle is the founder of Astute Graphics, developer of plugins for Adobe Illustrator since 2006 and the developers behind the ground-breaking Astui vector technology.

His interaction with a wide variety of freelance to global clients whilst working alongside major software development companies in the creative space has provided a unique insight into the industry.

Based in Hereford, England, Nicholas leads the amazing Astute Graphics team in delivering unique solutions that help keep the creative wheels turning.

Originally published at www.linkedin.com

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