In our recent redesign of InDesign Magazine, we did something radical: we dropped the butterfly from the logo.
But I bet many (perhaps most!) InDesign users today don’t even know why we had a butterfly in there at all… or why until recently our product reviews rated with a “numbers of butterflies” rather than “number of stars.” The reason is that the symbol of InDesign was a butterfly, from version 1.0 in 1999 until the release of version CS3 in 2007.
Back in 2009, Bob Levine wrote up a short history of InDesign naming here. Then Keith Gilbert provided a good history of InDesign releases here. And don’t forget James Wamser’s comprehensive list of versions and what features they brought us here.
Here, then, is a little roundup of InDesign splash screens — those graphics that pop up when you first launch the program. I wasn’t prescient enough to capture most of these myself, so friends supplied some, and others I cribbed from various sites around the internet (often sites that were providing pirated versions of the product, sadly).
In version CS3, Adobe dropped the butterfly identity, but they snuck in a secret easter egg “catch the butterfly” game.
This next image is a bit naughty… After CS6, Adobe was still trying to decide what the call the next version. Early in the beta cycle, everyone assumed it would be called CS7, including the InDesign team… so that’s what they listed in their “About” screen (below).
Later, of course, Adobe decided on the “Creative Cloud” (CC) naming, and a whole new era of splash screens and naming was born. Here’s version CC (a.k.a., CC 2013, or InDesign version 9):
The splash screens also started getting much more interesting, with artwork from designers all over the world!
CC 2014 (version 10):
CC 2015 (version 11):
CC 2017 (version 12):
CC 2018 (version 13):
This article was last modified on April 23, 2021
This article was first published on February 15, 2018
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