Photoshop is celebrating its 25th anniversary — that’d be its silver anniversary, if it were celebrating a marriage. (And I guess it is, in a way — the marriage of pixels and people who love them.)
Lynda.com published a beautiful site this week, called 25PS, dedicated to the honor and the glory that is Photoshop.
Scroll through the site to discover many fascinating, documentary-style videos about the program, like interviews with famous digital artists, retrospectives from some lynda.com authors (including me and David) who remember when Photoshop was just a young’n, archival Adobe footage, and other interesting finds.
This isn’t a Photoshop-centric blog, so why am I bringing it up?
Because while I nosing around the 25PS site, I discovered that some poor intern at lynda.com accidentally included a video about page layout! My guess is they were planning on saving it for the InDesign 25th anniversary, which isn’t until 2024.
Before they discover their mistake (and yes, I’m joking a little here), you have to take a look. Go to the In Retrospect part of the site and scroll down to the section called “Before there was Photoshop:”
The subtitle is, “Watch hands-on demonstrations of how Photoshop tasks were done in an analog-only world” but of course, laying out a full-page ad is not a Photoshop task. (If it is for you, you’re doing it wrong.) I’m referring to the video titled, “Graphic design tools.” The other video in this section, “Film photography” is just as good, but I’d think more relevant to Photoshop users.
Watch that “Graphic design tools” movie to see how InDesign has saved our collective bacon. Presented by affable Sean Adams (a professor at Pasadena’s Art Center College of Design), it’s a eye-opening 11-minute mini-doc on what page layout was like 30 years ago, before Adobe and Apple teamed up to bring publishing to our desktops.
See what it was like to lay out a single full-page ad when it all had to be done manually with T-squares and rubber cement and press-on type and Rubylith. Professor Adams does a great job of explaining it start to finish, you can tell he lived it and survived to tell the tale. It’s a wonder anything got published!
And while you’re on the site, be sure to see all the other wonderful videos lynda.com has published to help celebrate Photoshop’s 25th year.
This article was last modified on March 5, 2025
This article was first published on February 20, 2015
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