Before InDesign—Pagemaker & Postscript & Macintosh Led a Revolution

“It will stop your breathing,” says John McWade, “to find yourself standing in a line of four million and see no one standing in front of you.”

Summer 1985 at MacWorld in Boston, Apple, Adobe, and Aldus together introduced “The Macintosh Office,” a hardware-software suite comprised of the Apple Macintosh computer and LaserWriter printer, Aldus PageMaker page layout software, and Adobe Postscript page-description language that ran under the hood and made it all work. All four technologies were revolutionary. Together they mimicked our physical tools—drawing boards, T-squares, ruling pens—in the digital realm of pixels and glass, and changed the world’s largest industry permanently and completely.

Earlier that year, McWade had been working as the primary beta test person on the final versions of PageMaker, the forerunner of InDesign. After the Boston launch and for the next decade he found himself in demand at the heart of the “desktop publishing” revolution, the whirlwind that produced Illustrator and Photoshop, plus countless other hardware and software that evolved and merged into the tool suite we use today.

The technology, then as now, was promoted as empowering anyone to create books, magazines, brochures and so on. Its earliest adopters, however, were not designers but writers, marketers, and others who quickly found they lacked the skills to design beautiful or compelling documents. To address this need, McWade with his wife Gaye Anne in 1990 launched the magazine Before & After, How to Design Cool Stuff that for the next 24 years taught a generation how to design.

John will be with us to tell some of that story and to step us through some key design techniques. He’ll close with a few minutes about our careers—about the love that drew all of us into this field and holds us here.

About the Presenter

John McWade

John McWade is a graphic designer, writer, and instructor. Most recently a senior staff author at LinkedIn Learning, McWade in 1985 created PageLab, the world's first desktop publishing studio, and in 1990 he founded Before & After magazine to teach graphic design to desktop publishers. McWade's formative background is in printing and publication design, with a specialty in typography. He has authored three books — Before & After Page Design; Before & After Graphics for Business; and Before & After, How to Design Cool Stuff. He retired in 2019.