InDesign Turns 20 Years Old
Where were you on August 31, 1999? Downloading your favorite song from Napster on a new 56k modem? Stockpiling canned goods for Y2K? Waiting in line at the bookstore for the new Harry Potter? Folks at Adobe were busy changing the landscape of publishing by releasing a new program called InDesign.
Today, more than 91 million unique InDesign PDFs are generated annually. That’s got to be over a billion pages, give or take.
To mark the occasion, Adobe has published a celebratory blog posts, videos, font packs, and this awesome infographic (download a PDF version here).
There’s also a poster design event, starting on September 1st. To take part, you can use the free starter templates and assets found here. Then share your creation with the #InDesign20th hashtag on Facebook, Twitter, or Instagram.
Here’s to many more years of InDesigning!
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Perhaps Pagemaker should be on that chart of InDesign’s development? It was the software I cut my teeth on. Good memories.
indeed. I remember meeting Paul Brainerd standing at his white-cloth-covered table at MacWorld in 1985 peddling his new PageMaker. PageMaker blew my mind. I was given a copy and I was in heaven for many years after, using it daily, as well as training others to use it. Most impressive to me was the name Aldus…the first person to combine type and graphics on a single page. And look at where we are now! Wow.
Anne-Marie provided a link on Twitter to a YouTube video of the first demo of InDesign. It was demoed by Marc Eamon at Seybold Seminars Boston in March 1999. It was released August 31, 1999 at Seybold San Francisco. Marc posted this great video!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJaE09_hbfs&feature=youtu.be
Since we’re look at history here, I just came upon an even earlier “sneak peak” of InDesign 1.0 (code-named K2) which was demoed the previous September 1998 at Seybold Seminars. It was introduced by Steve Jobs of Apple which was getting people ready for the transition from Mac OS 8.5 to OS X (due to come out around the same time as InDesign 1.0). And he had the InDesign product manager, Ben Rotholtz, give an early preview (link posted by AppleInsider):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=151&v=MNtQnAT-2DI
Wonderful find, Steve! I had completely forgotten that K2 was demoed at Seybold 1998. I wonder if Adobe was prompted to demo K2 because in August of that year Quark announced it wanted to buy Adobe. Adobe wasn’t doing well financially, and (privately owned) Quark was still growing.
On August 31, 1999, I was probably cooking with gas with Quark 4.1 with David’s QuarkXPress books keeping me sane. ;-) InDesign was not on my radar. Crazy!
20 years of bugs and errors
I started my current job of developing InDesign plug-ins from InDesign CS2. It has been more than 10 years. How time flies.
.eps poster contest assets? Really?
I was a first adopter, eager to find a better alternative than Quark!
I couldn’t wait to replace Quark with InDesign back in the day. Flash forward 20 years and I can’t wait to replace InDesign with Affinity Publisher.
James: Well, it’s always fun to have something to look forward to. But of course, we replaced QX with ID because ID was the better tool for professional designers. There’s not a lot of evidence so far that Affinity Pub. is going to be far better (it’s not extensible, it doesn’t produce better typography, it doesn’t have the long doc features, etc). What it does promise is being less expensive. For some that will be enough.
I can imagine your voice by your comments
A major improvement is felt only by those who used the program from its first release