If you’re using Illustrator or Photoshop to build publications, you’re probably doing it wrong.
Magazines may not be the tour de force they once used to be, but that doesn’t mean the publishing world has finished. Far from it, actually, because design tools have moved with the times.
Twenty years ago, they evolved as well, and back in 1999 (on August 31, 1999), Adobe launched InDesign, competing with Quark as one of the main tools designers used for building publications.
Back then, the internet wasn’t the rich media filled archive of information that it is now, and the web hadn’t found a way to erode our love for magazines and other publications.
But times have changed, and we now use InDesign for more than just print work. Rather, Adobe’s major design tool can be used for more than mags, using it for books and brochures and generating PDFs, with over 91 million Acrobat files created through InDesign every year.
In fact, InDesign has also paved the way for Adobe’s free web and app designing tool, Adobe XD, which allows people to build ideas and experience for the web and for apps with either a Mac or Windows PC.
As for what’s in the future, Adobe is talking features built on its “Sensei” artificial intelligence system, a feature it spreads across other Adobe products, including Photoshop and Premiere. Using Adobe Sensei with InDesign, the company has suggested fonts may be improved by finding similar fonts, while other design elements can use technologies to speed up productivity, such as a “content-aware fit” feature to automatically crop images to fit the design of a document.
It suggests that 20 years into InDesign, Adobe isn’t done, and with the web continually shaping how we connect with media, suspect we’ll keep seeing those impacts as time goes on.
