(You can read more about how InDesign 1.0 fared against QuarkXPress 4 in this story from 1999 on our sister site Macworld). More importantly, it introduced innovation and competition, the latter driving the former for years to come. InDesign 1.0 wasn’t a match for QuarkXPress in every regard – and required more expensive hardware to run usably – but it had better typographic controls.

Then Adobe launched InDesign and, slowly at first, everything changed. Quark as company had a reputation for complacency and slow development, which many took as arrogance driven by market dominance. I joined Digit, as the print magazine that later became Digital Arts was called, in 1999 and swiftly learned the frustrations of losing hours of work due to crashes and idiosyncratic workflows. Layout itself was done in QuarkXPress, a tool that designers had even more of a love-hate relationship than they currently do with InDesign.

All graphic designers used Photoshop to edit images, and if you created logos and graphics alongside doing page layout you used Illustrator. In 1999, chances are you used only one or two of Adobe’s tools. We look back at the early years of InDesign with Adobe's Maria Yap, who worked on version 2.0.Ģ0 years ago, Adobe launched at tool called InDesign that changed how graphic design was done – and also began a change in the company’s tools that moved it from an app maker to having an integrated suite of tools, and began an approach to tool design that has lead to innovative apps such as Adobe XD.

Quarkxpress vs indesign