Rufus Deuchler | Travelogue

Well, who would have guessed? It's been ten years now, since InDesign 1.0 shipped (read the original press release). InDesign 1 included many groundbreaking features unmatched in page-layout products that were available at the time. Such as:

• Multi-line Text Composer
• Optical Margin Alignment
• Hierarchical Master Pages
• Extensive Multi-lingual support
• Optical Kerning
• High-resolution EPS and PDF display
• Multiple Redo & Undo
• Zooming from 5% to 4000%

I remember being very excited at that announcement, and could not wait to investigate it. The tag line was: "Page layout and design for the future of professional publishing", now how accurate and forward looking was that?
Sadly, version 1.0 did not answer the immediate needs of my fast paced production environment, so I let it go, and went back back to my usual workflow (and we can all guess what that was).
Just over two years later, on September 24, 2001, Adobe announced InDesign 2.0 (Press Realease), and I got all excited again. So when Adobe Italy started touring the country showcasing it's features in 2002, I took a day off my daily routine to attend one of their events; and this time they had me 100% convinced.
Come on! I mean stuff like:

• Transparency (drop shadows, feathering, and opacity settings to objects)
• Support of native files and transparency (transparent Photoshop, Illustrator and PDF files)
• Table creation features
• Long document support
• Etc...

I got myself InDesign 2.0, worked on a rather complex project of 300 pages involving maps, transparencies, multiple languages on layers, and so on... I then took it to the printer, and it did print like a charm. A few weeks later, I sold my licenses of Brand X, got Certified (ACE), and never looked back.
Thank you InDesign, and Happy Birthday, or would one call this an Anniversary? How much you have grown, and how much my life has changed thanks to you.

Feel free to share your experiences of InDesign here.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 9:29 PM | Permalink | Comments (10)