Adobe InDesign celebrates its 20 years

It’s been 20 years since the introduction of InDesign, and the industry for creative professionals has changed forever.

John Warnock, co-founder of Adobe, says, “If anyone had told me 20 years ago that we would have a fundamental impact on the publishing industry, I wouldn’t have believed them.”

InDesign was introduced to the world on the heels of the desktop-publishing revolution when personal computing and print publishing became more accessible to the masses. For the first time, individuals, businesses, and organizations - large and small - could directly design, layout, and publish almost any content effortlessly. InDesign’s early releases moved the industry forward with its support of advanced OpenType fonts, transparency features, and optical margin alignment.

20 years of innovations

They have come a long way since 1999. While InDesign wasn’t the first to provide a desktop-publishing solution, it focused on providing creative professionals with industry-first innovations. At the time, InDesign was the first desktop-publishing app to let publishers design with transparency. MacWorld published this about InDesign in 2001: “The most impressive feature in the coming InDesign update is object transparency. It lets you change the opacity of anything on your page—text, boxes, or pictures.” This innovation years ago is now something they take for granted.

Today, InDesign continues to launch innovations that one day will also seem mundane. Predictive-design components powered by intelligent Adobe Sensei algorithms will make designers more productive and faster than before. Content-Aware Fit, a feature built on Adobe Sensei, intelligently determines the focal point and automatically crops images to fit a document’s design.

New innovations continue to let them do things that were impossible years ago. Back in 1999, people around the world, from the US to Japan, were both curious and excited about the possibilities of InDesign. In a future of increasingly more powerful hardware and artificial intelligence capabilities, users can be assured that we’ve only scratched the surface of what’s possible with InDesign and the full Adobe Creative Cloud.

Celebrating with the community

Looking back over InDesign’s years in the community and the people who got them here, they thank everyone who has used the product. Millions of brilliant creative minds have supported them by using InDesign to create amazing things, from ebooks to brochures to magazines. Users’ feedback and continued support compel them to create the best experience possible for them.

As they celebrate this milestone, on behalf of the entire Adobe InDesign team, they thank users for their support over the past 20 years. The passion, hard work, and innovation motivate them, and they couldn’t be more honored to be the partner.