The Women of InDesign
Anne-Marie Concepción interviews four women who have been instrumental in the development of InDesign.
I’ve never thought of Adobe InDesign being gender-specific in any way. For example, when I look over the sea of faces in the audience at an InDesign Conference, I see a roughly even mix of women and men. The same is true for our speakers and the corporate students in my classes; even online, in InDesign forums and help groups, things seem to be completely integrated, gender-wise.
But at the InDesign conference, during the “Ask Adobe Anything” session, when we invite up to the stage the five or six InDesign engineers and product managers who flew in from Noida, India for the event, it’s a different story. Up troops a bunch of guys to take their seats onstage. Nice guys, intelligent and kind guys, but … all guys.
Appearances are deceiving. There are actually a number of women involved with the design and functionality of Adobe InDesign, more now than ever before, and in fact women have been instrumental to InDesign’s success from the very beginning. For this “Women in InDesign” issue, I thought it would be interesting to get to know a few of these important team members.
Robin Briggs
Software Engineer, InDesign 1.0
Robin Briggs helped bring InDesign 1.0 to the world. She was a PageMaker coder at Aldus Corporation when that company was purchased by Adobe in 1994, and she continued to work on it after the acquisition. But, she said, “While PageMaker was quite successful for a long time, […] there came a time when it seemed we would be better able to do the features we wanted if we started all over again.”
Robin ended up being the first member of the PageMaker team to work on InDesign. She started on the early prototypes in 1992, but the first official release of InDesign didn’t arrive for over six years, when InDesign 1.0 was released in 1999. A long time in gestation! She says, “Getting InDesign started was a bit like putting up a tent. There was a bit of flailing around in the beginning, but once we had a team where everyone had the same understanding of what we were building, it came together really well.”
Her work was mainly on the back end. Robin recalled that one of the problems with adding new features to PageMaker was that changes in one place would have unintended consequences in another. That’s why, in InDesign, she purposely led the group in developing a system that would have clear boundaries between the components. “That was where InDesign’s plug-in system came from. A single document is composed of a lot of objects, and we set it up so that different plug-ins could supply different objects, or extend the objects that were already there.” It was a completely novel way of putting together a major software program.
Robin stayed with the InDesign team for almost two decades. After that, she worked for a few years on other more esoteric Adobe projects like server-based software. She moved on in 2014, when she “began to lose touch with why I was doing it; we didn’t have contact with customers and ultimately I decided that I wanted to work on projects that seemed like they would more directly benefit people.”
Robin’s latest endeavor is a tool called Taming Bigfoot. “It’s a personal carbon calculator. You tell it what your daily activities are, and it tells you how much CO2 was released as a consequence. The idea is to teach people which of their activities are big contributors to global warming and which things are not, so they can make informed choices about what they do.”
Although she was often “the only woman—or woman engineer—in the room” during her years at Adobe, she never felt discriminated against. “I am sure there are some things that would have been easier for me if I’d been male, but there was nothing that couldn’t be overcome. I always tried to see things from other people’s perspective, and to settle disputes based on the data we had.”
Robin’s advice for women considering getting into the field is on-target for anyone: “If you enjoy programming, and you enjoy abstractions, you should go for it. Be selective about what kind of group to work in—some are very cut throat and competitive, some are much more cooperative. Pick a culture you’ll be comfortable living with, because you spend a lot of your time at work.”
Maria Yap
Lead Product Manager, InDesign 2.0
A yearbook photographer in high school with dreams of filmmaking, Maria Yap decided to attend The American University in Washington, D.C. “because it had one of the few hands-on filmmaking programs.” Her Visual Communications major required her to take classes such as “Design Essentials, Color Theory, and Effective Communications.” Soon she found she enjoyed these topics even more than film.
After a stint working in a design studio with an early Mac, QuarkXPress, and the first versions of Illustrator and Photoshop, Maria became a QuarkXPress expert. “I could create any kind of design in it—from museum exhibitions to annual reports, 7-color high dynamic range posters to complex packages.” She trained and consulted other design firms, and became an Associate Professor at American University teaching computer graphics.
Maria joined Adobe in 1998 as the Associate Product Manager for Acrobat Distiller, which was a standalone program at the time for making PDFs from PostScript files (now it’s part of Acrobat Pro). She garnered a strong reputation for understanding customers and being able to translate what they needed to language that the engineers understood.
When she first learned about K2, the code name for InDesign 1.0, she was intrigued. “We were going to take on QuarkXPress,” the market leader, which she already knew quite well. “Ultimately, I was recruited to join the InDesign team because of my background in design, my experience with QuarkXPress, and my early reputation as a product manager.”
As the lead product manager for InDesign 2.0 (code name: Annapurna, which, like K2, is the name of a Himalayan mountain) she faced her own Mount Everest. QuarkXPress still owned the page layout market, and InDesign 1.0 was far from perfect. “We were under a lot of pressure, because 1.0 was struggling. We had to fix issues, address key customer pain points, be innovative … The entire team knew that we would only get one more chance to meet the market and customer expectations.”
Luckily for us, Maria and her team persisted. InDesign 2.0 is generally regarded as the first professionally “usable” release, one that “turned the tide,” as she puts it, allowing QuarkXPress users to make the switch with confidence. Three cheers for Maria and her crew!
During her stint with InDesign, Maria had been commuting between her home base near Adobe headquarters in San Jose, California, and the Seattle, Washington, base where most of the InDesign development team was located. “I knew I would not sustain that pace—and I wasn’t able to move to Seattle. Knowing that my time was limited, I made sure to set up my successor and get the team ready for version 3.0.” When that was released as part of the Creative Suite, she moved over to lead the Adobe Photoshop product management team. Maria rose through ranks and is currently Adobe’s Vice President for Digital Imaging.
Even though it has been many years since Maria was directly responsible for the development of InDesign, she still likes to stay connected. For example, she’s been involved in some of the InDesign team’s internal product reviews. “I think they appreciate my feedback since they know that I have deep experience with the product and the user base,” she says. And yes, Maria uses InDesign herself, “from helping with my kids’ school yearbook to making an invitation—it’s my go-to app for layout and design. InDesign is ingrained in me.”
Like Robin, Maria didn’t find it especially difficult being one of the few women behind the InDesign scenes. “If I’m the only woman on the team, I look at this as an advantage because I will naturally bring a different perspective. I also bring other perspectives—I’m a minority, I don’t have a computer science or engineering background, and I’m a former creative pro, so I know the customer.”
Shailja Gupta
Computer Scientist II, Adobe InDesign
Growing in up Delhi, India, Shailja Gupta had some exposure to computers in high school. She was intrigued enough by them to take a few classes outside of school, “just to satisfy my curiosity,” she says, “but my curiosity continued to grow.” Soon enough, she realized she had found her passion: coding. Shailja says that coding is “an amalgamation of two of my favorite subjects: math and computers.”
She was only a freshman at Delhi University when Adobe recruited her to work on the InDesign team. Since graduating with an MCA degree (Masters of Computer Applications) in 2009, she’s been a full-time member of the InDesign development crew.
It was a tough road in the beginning, she recalls. “It takes significant time to ramp up when joining the InDesign team as a newcomer. There are many aspects of the job—everything from customers to the print and publishing domain and current features and bugs—that you need to understand to be an effective team member.”
Like all new team members, she started by implementing small parts within an InDesign feature. As her expertise grew, she became a “feature lead.” In that role, her responsibilities encompass both software architecture and design, in addition to overseeing junior team members and collaborating with stakeholders.
Currently, Shailja’s focus is mainly in the typography features of InDesign, including footnotes and endnotes (for which we all thank you, Shailja!), Unicode, multilingual support, and “anything around fonts.” Even after ten years of coding InDesign, she says, “I still get blown away by it sometimes. The depth, the breadth, and the complexity of the product is impressive.” If she were in charge of InDesign with unlimited resources, she would do everything necessary “to make sure that everything published in the world is created in InDesign. And add a coffee machine to it.” What an excellent feature request!
As far as being a woman coder in a mostly male environment, Shailja says the challenge is not gender-based, but parenting-based. As a working mother, it can be difficult “to juggle between those roles, so work-life balance is a must for me.”
Shailja’s advice for anyone considering a career in computer science: “Don’t imitate anyone, listen to yourself, and go for the thing you are most passionate about to succeed. You need to enjoy your work to make it work.”
Monica Singh
Software Engineer, Adobe InDesign
If the name “Monica Singh” looks familiar to you, it’s likely because she’s been the Adobe InDesign team member who answered your InDesign question in the Adobe Community Forums or the InDesign UserVoice community, where users post and vote on feature requests and bug reports. Part of her responsibilities during her 5-year stint with the InDesign team, from 2013–2018, was to work directly with customers in online forums, and it was always a welcome sight to see her name attached to an answer to your query.
Monica was raised in Agra. She has a master’s degree from the Indian Institute of Management Lucknow in the state of Uttar Pradesh, India. Like Shailja, Monica was recruited from Adobe right out of school to work on the InDesign team. She was already familiar with the program—along with the rest of the Adobe creative software pantheon—because at school, she “developed creative content like flyers, brochures, posters, and invitations” for the various workshops and cultural and technical events she conducted. She even created her own wedding invitation in InDesign!
On the job, Monica has had to dive into understanding and implementing workflow and export formats (including EPUB, HTML, and Publish Online) from the perspectives of customers, vendors (she had to consult with the Apple iBooks team for some EPUB intricacies), and coding/team members. She’s enthusiastic about her most recent work with Machine Learning, a type of artificial intelligence that relies on the computer learning from data and detecting patterns in order to make decisions. As examples, she says “I am sure you have used features like Adjust Layout and Content-Aware Fit,” two notable bits of magic derived from Machine Learning (aka, “Adobe Sensei”).
Although she’s recently moved to the Adobe Cloud Extensibility Platform team, Monica relished her time with the InDesign team, and says it was one of the most enjoyable experiences she’s had, professionally. It was her first position in the computing field, and she loved how “there were so many new things to learn,” as well as novel experiences like “working with customers, building new features from scratch, and waiting for the feedback post release.” She was especially struck with how her colleagues on the InDesign team were so committed to working with customers to learn the challenges they were facing to and “nail down solutions.”
She’s never thought of herself working in a male-dominated field, but did note that the number of women working on the InDesign team has gone way up in the five years she was there. “We have a good-sized Girls Group in the team now,” she says.
Why Not You?
Women can learn how to code software programs just like men can, but resources that support you along the way can be hugely helpful. Check out Girls Who Code, whose mission is to shrink the gender gap in the software engineering field (which is actually getting larger, believe it or not) by pairing up mentors and learners starting in middle school and running seminars and summer camps. Adobe is one of the many supporting tech companies who work with Girls Who Code. A similar organization is Women Who Code, an international outfit with local chapters, a job board, meetups, hackathons, and other fun geeky stuff.