I should have put that statement in quotes. That’s coming from a principal I know that has his own agency and also from some others that I’ve done business with. They feel a lot of designers today are lacking the knowledge that’s needed for print projects.
Well, it’s definitely a big problem. I don’t think that design schools are adequately preparing students for the business and technical challenges that will face them once they graduate. Instead, way too many schools still tend to concentrate on aesthetics and making cool stuff without seemingly realizing that there are huge practical issues of equal importance.
Both Sketch and Adobe XD are for designing phone apps - they have no relevance to print. Undoubtedly the market for quality phone apps and their design is still growing, and many designers will find work there, but no-one is pretending that this will ever replace print.
Ballard,
Indesign has been the basis of a lot of new apps from Adobe. Muse was created from engineers from Indesign. Now they finished Muse and they will incorporate the muse code in XD. Initially XD was designed to create UX and UI designs, so merely screen devices. I think that dreamweaver will become obsolete not InDesign.
InDesign has been designed as a Layout hub. You start a layout within InDesign and you have multiiple output options, print, pub, app, screen and so on. Those export options still need some tweaking, but they are working on it.Slowly but surely. Have a look at the publish online options in InDesign.
@ Printdriver
I hope that Adobe doesn’t merge Illustrator and Indesign, that would be a nightmare. Something like Coreldraw, where draw options and layout options get entangled in such a way that you get a very, very, very bloated app.
In The end time will tell…
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Hi Carlo. I’ve been following these trends for a very long time and I’m fully aware of the applications and their purposes. I was asking the question because researching about design trends and where things are going really downplays print being used at all these days. It’s all about digital! There are a lot of print vendors that I used that have gone under in the past several years, but the printers that kept themselves afloat are doing extremely well.
This all reminds me of what my mentor told me about the rise of computers in the field of design and how blind designers were to the trend of new technology that took over the industry. It seems that it’s not anything that would happen now, but the stories have a close resemblance.
Sure, things will change al the time, that’s a fact.
Digital publishing will gain a larger market, that’s a fact.
Adobe and other players will change their way of developing tools to achieve that changing market.
So we are in a continuous changing way of looking at things and a continuous learning curve. What makes this job pretty exciting…
Sometines decisions made by companies, like Adobe, are totally nonsense after a certain time. See Flash…
In the end designs are not limited or depended on the software you use. It’s the skills that matter, and the correct tools to achieve this.
Flash was two issues. One was security holes like Swiss cheese and the other was a political debate between Apple (rise of iPhone and lack of Flash support) and Adobe. Those issues forced CSS to be a lot more versatile than it was.
Nonsense that Adobe acquired it and developed it more, or nonsense that they didn’t fix all the bugs and were so quick to drop it after Apple didn’t support it?
I think that’s a general statement.
Flash was a technology that couldn’t cope with mobile devices. It sucked the battery live, that was the reason why Apple dropped it. Apple wanted the battery live of their products last longer and Adobe couldn’t find a solution. So it was a battle between hardware developers and software developers.
This battle will continue. Hardware developers want speed and battery live, software developers want a wow or a click and wow factor. These ideas often have a different implementation in the real world.
@ ballard
Indeed it’s a general statement I gave. I can’t look in my kristal boll and forecast the future; even if it would be nice (maybe I could win the lottery this evening) 
I just wasn’t sure if you were saying that it was nonsense for Adobe to pick it up, or nonsense for Adobe to drop it the way they did when they did.
I never heard all the reasons, but I did hear something about Flash not being very compatible with multi-touch devices because it relies on a single cursor. As for the processing power and the battery life, that would explain the vector graphic rendering problem I mentioned on this other thread.
Flash was/is all of the following. Each of these things contributed to its demise, but when you add them up, I’m surprised it lasted as long as it did.
- Much more time-consuming to work with than HTML
- Proprietary in an opensource-based web
- Buggy
- Not able to execute without a browser plugin
- An SEO nightmare
- Difficult to work with
- Was more about eye candy than content
- Was inefficient and slow
- Drained batteries
- Didn't lend itself to database-driven content without major effort
- Didn't play well with content management systems
- A major security problem
- Only partially functional on touch devices
And cured people of any desire to learn animation. Well, at least one person.
I’m pretty sure that Adobe Animate borrows a lot from Flash.
3/4ths of the problems listed here were solved in some form or another. But that doesn’t matter since the owner of Flash has decided to pull the plug on it. One sad part isn’t that Flash is getting killed, but that it got killed by a foster parent that never wanted it in the first place. Back in 2000, the future foster parent tried unsuccessfully to kill Flash in its prime with Adobe LiveMotion which they dubbed “the Flash Killer.”
The other sad part is that the lynch mob against Flash never knew Flash for what it was good for. They heard the bad news from information technologists who were afraid of graphic designers having more control over the web than they had. So rather than work to fix the problems, they threw the baby out with the bath water. Now we get to watch these same people brag about “new capabilities” from cramming together a hodge podge of technologies developed in silos just to do what Flash was already doing 2 decades ago.
Is the web better off without Flash? Sure it is. Every technology has a shelf life. Flash has had a good quarter of a century run. It’s taught us a lot. It gave us an appetite for richer media. It gave us high quality fast moving animations and sophisticated interactivity at a time when dialup speeds were the norm. It gave us custom typefaces long before web fonts. We got to play some cool games online. It got YouTube launched. And now its DNA lives on through Adobe Animate. Anyone who didn’t understand what Flash was good for probably won’t understand what its replacement is good for either. Anyone who can’t distinguish the blessings of the graphic format from the curses of the plugin will throw the baby out with the bath water again. For those who are curious, this is a good place to start:
Sorry, but that’s just not the case. Almost none of these problems were ever successfully fixed. I’m puzzled by your passionate defense of this ill-conceived and fatally flawed software.
Some of Flash’s problems weren’t fixable because of the inherent nature of it being an oddball, add-on, proprietary plugin technology grafted onto the web instead of being part of it.
Why Adobe never fixed those things that could have been addressed, but weren’t, is anybody’s guess. My personal guess is that, like most of Adobe’s forays into web-related software, they just couldn’t get past their print-focused mentality of building bloated proprietary solutions rather than creating tight, focused products that meshed well with web standards instead of competing against them.
I can’t lay all the blame on Adobe, though. Flash was already on the wrong path before Adobe acquired it. Macromedia suffered from the same sorts of problems — a company with its roots in print that never did manage to transition to the open, non-proprietary nature of the Internet.
I’m certainly no expert in this area, but while Animate does do the same sorts of timeline nesting and so forth, it’s really a different platform. As the Flash format was wheezing its final breaths, Adobe took a lunge at its market with Edge Animate, their first shot at Flash-like authoring with output rooted in HTML5/Javascript/CSS3. I dabbled around with it for a few weeks and found it quite a bit easier to figure out than Flash, with a UI structure more like Director’s and stronger visual correlations between the timeline and stage than I ever found in Flash. Unfortunately, I didn’t have any serious animation projects on my plate at the time, so significant traction was never gained. Not long after that, for reasons at which I could only guess, Adobe’s marketing crew quietly opened an artery in the short-lived Edge mini-suite concept and re-badged Animate with a hint of “the new Flash,” so while I haven’t done the same sort of dabbling with the later versions of Animate, I’m of the impression it’s more an evolution of Edge than Flash.
They didn’t need to fix it because they never needed to fix it. Again, they never liked it because it wasn’t rooted in their bread-and-butter standard, PostScript. The macromedia buyout was a competitive buyout. They didn’t care about most of macromedia technology. They just wanted to kill the competition.
The web is made up of add-ons. The web browser itself was the first add-on that defined the web. The web itself is an add-on to the internet in effect. What you are saying is not part of the web is proprietary software. Just because a software is proprietary, doesn’t mean it will always be. If a company decides to turn a software over to the open-source community, it’s just as much a “part of the web” as any other browser-based technology.
Some of the problems were fixed by 3rd parties and the open source community when Adobe made the SWF format open. But any add-on can eventually become a security risk, including PDF readers according to this article.
Flash started on a different path. It didn’t come from macromedia. I met the developers on multiple occasions before they were bought by Macromedia. It was a company called FutureWave Software. The animated version of SmartSketch that eventually became Flash was called “Future Splash”. I almost joined the team as a tech writer before the company was founded in 1993 when it was developing graphic software for AT&T’s PDA. I still occasionally do contract work with one of their former employees.
As for macromedia, they didn’t start in print either. They started as a merger of two electronic media companies. They only tried to move towards print 3 years later when they bought out Altsys Corporation and adopted Freehand as the primary vector graphic development program. I’ve seen companies that were using freehand as their primary page layout program.
Macromedia was ahead of Adobe when it came to electronic display, which is what the web relies on. They could have owned the future. They could have worked with the W3C, made their own browser, and ran circles around Mozilla and Microsoft long before Chrome and Safari had a shot at it. But they probably were too distracted by their competition with Adobe and Quark in the print industry. In the end, they had an answer to every one of Adobe’s products, and had multiple products Adobe never had an answer to. They just didn’t have a standard for print like PostScript that made any of their products a must have. But they could have made SmartSketch a standard for 2D graphics as the PostScript of electronic display.
I know this seems like another thread that has gone far off topic. However, this discussion of Flash and Macromedia is somewhat related to this topic too. Back on the topic of InDesign, it’s whole future hinges on print. PostScript is the foundation of print. I’m not sure how much PostScript has changed in the development of PDF. But EPS was once the primary print file format. Macromedia had an answer to PDF which I think was the main reason Adobe finally decided to buy them out. It wasn’t just to kill Flash.
It’s all about the standards. Some of you may have heard of FlashPaper. It was Macromedia’s backwards approach from what Adobe took in developing standards. PostScript was designed for print, but was eventually translated for electronic display in the PDF. FlashPaper was Flash (SmartSketch format) designed for electronic display, but translated to print. Had that taken hold, PDF would have died before the web browser plugin ever established a foothold.
It’s still possible for any company to develop a graphic format to take the same approach. If they can develop a graphic format that is superior to Adobe’s for electronic media, it’s just a matter of time before that format can be translated to print. What matters most is whether or not the big printers will adopt that new print standard. If that were to happen, Adobe’s monopoly would have nothing to survive on but it’s reputation and any new features it could manage to patent. They will have screwed themselves by moving to a software rental business model because the newer generation of renters won’t be as loyal as the older dying generation of owners like myself. It’s already difficult enough to patents software algorithms. And all their newer must-have features could be reverse-engineered.
PrintDriver, you might be the most qualified to tell us how much the big printing industry is dependent on PDF/PostScript, or if they are capable of adapting to an alternative standard.
In summary, if InDesign dies, it will be either because print has died enough to make PDFs obsolete, or because another company has come up with a better alternative to PDFs that work just as well with the big printers and works even better for electronic display. I’m surprised Quark hasn’t tried it yet.
Print is VERY DEPENDENT on PDF files. Most print production is ran through PDFs and PDF editors, such as Pit Stop. Could the industry change file formats? Of course, but it will take time for hardware and software to start excepting a new format and for people to be trained. There’s also the point that print is considered more as written in stone than the web.
PDF files themselves have become a golden standard for everything from basic documents up to governmental official files due to their versatility in print, digital, signature, and security features. The initial use of PDF files was actually for lawyers, who had to search through extremely large libraries of books to find passages needed for lawsuits. So I doubt PDFs are going anywhere soon. That leads to if there is always going to be some sort of “digital paper” InDesign will have a purpose, but slightly different.