How Adobe InDesign Conquered the World of Graphic Design

Adobe InDesign’s initial release looked like a complete flop. Here’s how the company turned things around.

Illustration: Noah Baker

Twenty years ago, Adobe unleashed InDesign, a new vision of desktop publishing. The program, which launched as a $700 CD-ROM, was destined to reshape the field of graphic design — but it needed to win over skeptical publishers first.

InDesign 1.0 received a fairly strong review in PC Magazine in 1999 that noted innovative features like optical kerning, which allowed designers to elegantly tighten and loosen the spaces between characters, and text gradients, which painted letters in multiple colors. But the critic, Luisa Simone, wrote that developing a good user experience was only half the battle for Adobe. “We expect the publishing industry to reserve judgement on InDesign until it proves itself in a production environment,” she wrote.

And publishers, at least at first, decided InDesign wasn’t for them. Most companies stuck with the de facto standard of the era, QuarkXPress. This meant that the design of books, magazines, newspapers, flyers, and billboards remained outside of Adobe’s domain.

The company had a lot of work to do. Even the project’s codename suggested a steep climb. Adobe had…