Wow, has it been that long? The tool that started with great hype & some big teething problems has matured into an industry-standard, multi-channel (print, PDF, & Web), automated publishing powerhouse. Congrats, guys! Adobe evangelist Rufus Deuchler and longtime print maven David Blatner share some brief reminiscences.
I remember a demo of K2 back then (in Chicago). I haven’t used Quark since about 2003.
I designed an illustrated book in Indesign 1.0! I was so sick and tired of QuarkXPress’ monopoly and limitations (multiple undos!) that I pressed on, despite frequent crashes, export problems and other road blocks. Haven’t looked back ever since. Happy birthday, Indesign!
Wow. Now I feel old. Ten?
[Imagine the people who started working on the project in its early days. I may be wrong, but I think at least the ideas for a PageMaker replacement were germinating at Aldus before Adobe acquired it–in 1994. –J.]
Gratulerer med 10-års fødselsdagen, kjære InDesign!!!
I’m proud to say that I jumped from QuarkXPress to ID 1.5 in the spring of 2001 — I saw The Future already in that 1.5 version, I knew Adobe was super-committed to developing it, despite teething problems, and I have never missed QXP for a second since then.
I’d feel better about the anniversary if Adobe allowed an upgrade path from ID2…
[I hear you. Of course, ID2 is 7.5 years old, and if we offered an upgrade path, we’d get our butts chewed by people who say, “How come you’re rewarding people who’ve skipped a bunch of versions?” And if we then started offering tiered pricing, people would say, “Hah hah, so complex–just like Microsoft, losers.” There’s no way to make everyone happy. –J.]
I picked up both Mac and PC versions at the first demo in SF. I was so grateful to say goodbye to QXP.
Wow, it’s been that long? I remember meeting David Blatner at a creativepro dinner and gushing too much about InDesign to him. He was still cautiously optimistic about it but was still in the Quark camp. I was telling him InDesign was going to be future and arguing the points of why it was better than Quark could ever be.
Happy Birthday InDesign, I knew you had it in you.
By the way John, this new captcha suuucks. I’ve tried six times so far to get it right. Are you trying to eliminate robots and people with less than great eyesight? 😉 Maybe try recaptcha instead?
Oh sorry, it looks like the captcha doesn’t work in the latest Safari. I had to repost in Firefox in order for it to work.
Oh sorry, it looks like the captcha doesn’t work in the latest Safari. I had to repost in Firefox in order for it to work.
Works for me in the new Safari, but the captchas seem to time out if you take too long writing a post. It’s happened to me a few times. There must be a better way.
The vast majority of computer users today have probably never even heard of Aldus, but to this day “Adobe PageMaker” still sounds wrong to me.
And yeah, I can believe the seeds of InDesign germinating in the Aldus days. PageMaker pretty quickly outgrew its original purpose as a basic page layout app. Today, Apple’s Pages strikes me as an app with a similar goal to its design. It’s quite literally a modern Page Maker.
It’s hard to believe InDesign’s been around that long! Since it’s the app that I spend the most work time in, I’m glad that it’s something I like using. But I’m surprised at some of the quark-bashing. As much of a professional step above quark that ID is, quark was also that much better than the competition way back when. Maybe I feel this way just because I love good typesetting. I’m just happy to see the both the technical side and the art side become more capable.
Bob,
Go to eBay and get a legit ID v3.0 (CS) or v4.0 (CS2) upgrade. That is how to get on the upgrade path again, for crying out loud! eBay has done a great job at weeding out ripoff artists and with PayPal the product price is guaranteed if it is not up to your or Adobe’s licensing standards. Adobe has been very good to me and others on registering pre-owned versions of their software that have licenses that can get transferred. Any questions, just ask me.
Happy birthday ! Sad to say, we all started with QXP and we’re all happy to have dropped it in favor of InDesign… (as I remember, event the list of recent files was absent from the “file” menu of QXP5… a simple end-user friendly feature…)
Thanks for talking me into using InDesign, George! 😉
Yeah, InDesign wasn’t compelling in the early days, but ID2 and CS1 were life-changing.
I started with 1.5, switching from PageMaker. Despite the fear of losing all my work, I converted the whole collection of books I was working on –and never regretted. It was like I had discovered a renewed love for my work, everything seemed so beautiful (and it printed wonderfully well too)!
Congrats to everyone involved in the making of this great app!!
Once upon a time while working in the university world, I got flown to Seattle to take part in a summit on the future of PageMaker after it had been bought by Adobe, and what we were discussing ended up being InDesign.
I was a PageMaker 1.0 user on a Mac Plus in design school at Carnegie-Mellon in 1984.
Aside from a brief foray into Quark territory that overlapped the InDesign launched, I’ve been using ID ever since.
-mpm
The thing that makes me happy about 10 years of ID is that it has brought competition back to the marketplace. Quark had beat PageMaker, and that was a problem. Arguably, Quark’s customer service, which used to be miserable, is often better than Adobe’s these days, and Quark has been forced to rethink their product design (e.g., to update to more modern conventions). Pages was created within that decade. These are all good things caused in whole or in part by ID.
Personally, I’ve always struggled with the interface of ID and the high system requirements, especially in the early days. I guess I don’t like many of the built-in assumptions the program makes (the metaphor, if you will). Someone said to me once that ID is page layout using a Photoshop mindset. That makes no sense to me.
These days, I don’t do much layout, but when I do, I always jump to one of QXP 7, Pages or Freehand. I only own ID because it came with the bundle. On occasion, I use ID at work (where I don’t have access to QXP) and the newer versions have not done anything to lessen my discomfort with using it.
Nevertheless, for those of you that love ID, more power to you. I don’t, but it has made other products that I do use better (or come into being).
I would understand that point of view, except, at the same time ID 2.0 users were being frozen out, even older versions of Pagemaker were being offered the upgrade path. That’s what is unfair.
Will InDesign be around much longer? I noticed the print production is going down slowly b/c of massive web contents and etc. (Newspaper for example).