During holidays like Christmas, Black Friday and etc, Adobe usually has a promo offer on their products. Last year, Adobe gave existing users free 3 months’ worth of subscription because of the Pandemic and I really applaud them for this act. I paid around 30 USD/monthly each month because I availed of the special monthly pricing last December 2019.

If you have an existing monthly subscription and it’s a higher price compared to the new promo offer, talk to a chat agent so your current plan can be canceled and you can use the new promo plan. I have tried this two times already in 2018 and 2019.

Fast forward 2021, the prices have gone back to their standard pricing. I’m using Illustrator, Photoshop, XD and Lightroom so the only option for me is to get the complete Creative Cloud package. The monthly subscription fee is around 53 USD which is the base price since 2019. I read some stuff online that if you decide to cancel your Creative Cloud plan, you will have some options before cancellation. Note that you need to have used the complete creative plan for at least a year for this to work properly. There’s a huge additional charge to your bill if you decide to cancel it prematurely.

Get a custom deal.

So in your Adobe account, go to View Plan Details > Cancel Plan. There will be 4 pages you need to complete before you fully cancel your plan, but we are not doing this.

On the Feedback page, just mention it’s too expensive or state whatever your reason is.

Details show the amount that will be deducted if you’re a new subscriber and you will cancel it prematurely.

The 3rd page shows Offers and you will be presented with 3 options. 1st column gives you free two months. The second column allows you to change to a different plan. And the last column takes you to a customer agent. I didn’t click the “Start Chat” button here since I was already talking to Adobe Chat earlier, I told them about this method and that I wanted an option for a “Custom Deal”.

I was being honest, the monthly price was too expensive for me this year and I wanted a discount. The chat support gave me 90 days of free service and a new monthly price of 33 USD/monthly which was what I paid in 2019.

The custom deal might vary for each user but getting 3 months free plus a discounted monthly fee is something worth considering. Hope you like this tip!

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It was a really tough 2020 and I’m hoping you are all safe and healthy especially in this COVID crisis. It has allowed everyone around the world to rethink the common office workplace and switch to something home-based.

Now, let’s talk about the new site design. So I was inspired by websites using flat-based vectors and SVG’s. For those who are not aware, SVG’s or Scalable Vector Graphics are lighter compared to JPEG and other file formats. The only downside is it could be a target for hackers, especially that is based on an XML file. Although you can use plugins if you use WordPress to make sure your website is secure.

Site Design

Aside from using Adobe Illustrator to design all the vector graphics and icons, I export them as SVG’s to make my website quicker. There are still some performance issues I need to address but it’s unrelated to WordPress or the theme I’m using. It has something to do with my host, Siteground. The last time I redesigned my website I coded it in Bootstrap. It was a nice design but I wasn’t able to add blog posts or edit things quickly like in WordPress. If you want to check my previous site versions you can use the Wayback Machine by the Internet Archive site. It allows you to view the previous versions of a website. It stores a snapshot of a web page, sometimes it’s a hit or miss but based on my website it was able to show some site versions from 2008 to the present.

OceanWP

This is a free theme created by Nicolas Lecocq. What I really like about this theme is the speed, as it allows you to disable some bloatware from different WordPress features you may or may not use on your website. I do suggest disabling them one by one to make sure it doesn’t break your website. OceanWP also has a paid version and some premium extensions. I suggest you get the premium extensions or premium theme if the free theme is insufficient for your website.

Elementor

This is the recommended Visual Editor plugin to use with OceanWP. It’s a nice plugin but I just think there should be options to disable some features like in OceanWP.

What’s next?

I’m currently learning Javascript and hoping I can do this in 4 months’ time. It’s one of my weakest skills since I’m having a hard time understanding concepts. If I do learn Javascript just like when I learned HTML and CSS. I will post some sample code and projects here in this blog. The SVG’s that I have made will be updated in the near future, so expect a minor upgrade to the site design.

I’m also going to put some Bootstrap site templates, or Adobe Illustrator tutorials here just like my old site in 2011-2014. Those were the good days when I was still part of the Adobe Fireworks extension “beta” team. So I hope you check this blog, and if you’re interested in hiring me for your next project, just send me a message.

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