Founders at Work.pdf

Charles Geschke 295
who are responsible for all those catalogs you get in the mail. If you think back
25 years ago, you didn’t receive many catalogs. They were too expensive to
produce.
Livingston: If you had a background in printing, did you create the products to
purposely encourage good design?
Geschke: I understood the difference between good and bad design. We also
understood that, if you are in the hammer business, you can’t require that a person
who buys a hammer be a good carpenter, so we opened up our tools to a
much larger community. And some of the early printouts looked like ransom
notes. People would put every available typeface on one page, which is not
good design. So there was a lot of bad design going on. It wasn’t the fault of the
technology; it was the fact that people were given a new medium from their
point of view, as opposed to the professional’s point of view, and they were
struggling to figure out how to do it well.
I think that’s gotten a lot better—not perfect, but better. More importantly,
the people who are great designers have been given more creative freedom
now. They can do things at a lower cost and faster than they ever could have
before. A lot of design work now wouldn’t have been practical to try to do some
other way using hand methods, but now with the ability to manipulate layers
within photographs and do all this kind of really sophisticated kind of art,
people can do design that they never could do before. What we believed in very
strongly was that the rules of quality for what was produced were not set by the
computer industry, but by the publishing industry. It didn’t matter whether or
not some guy at IBM thought it looked good. What mattered was someone at
Random House or Time-Life or Ogilvy & Mather or someone like that appreciated
it.
I remember in the early days bringing home our first color separation work
and showing it to my dad. He still had an engraver’s loupe. He pulled out his
loupe and he looked at the halftone patterns and he looked up at me and said,
“Not very good.” And I said, “I know, but it’s going to get better.” And then a
few years later I brought home something that I knew was pretty good. I
showed it to my dad and didn’t say much. He looked up with a big smile on his
face and said, “Now that’s good.” That was a wonderful moment.
Livingston: Is there anything that Adobe does now to preserve the efficiency or
the “startupyness” of a young company?
Geschke: It gets harder as you get bigger. What John and I have tried to do as
chairs of the board is to reinforce to the current CEO, Bruce Chizen, the
importance of innovation and the importance of taking some of the investment
of the company and not immediately pouring it back into the current businesses.
As I described earlier, as we were trying to develop our retail sales channel,
people thought that was a waste of time and money. The product lines that are
bringing in the most revenue believe that they have a right to all the resources
of the company. Part of good management, and part of the attitude of a startup,
is to recognize that, while those businesses are incredibly successful today and