The Big Shifts in the Evolution of Graphic Design Programs Risen from the ashes of many of the former competitors is the one that has managed to secure space on every modern designer’s hard drive: Adobe. Although Quark is still around, it has fallen from the great heights of popularity it achieved in the 90s. Where are these players today? Most of them have disappeared amid mergers and acquisitions. And Xerox PARC made some of the greatest foundational contributions of all-GUI, WYSIWYG text editing, and the computer mouse. Quark is best known for QuarkXPress, a WYSIWYG desktop publishing software that held 95% market share in the 1990s. Macromedia produced the monumental Dreamweaver, Shockwave, and Director applications. Altsys Corporation offered an early competitor to vector graphics program Adobe Illustrator ( FreeHand). Aldus Corporation developed PageMaker (the software that brought desktop publishing to the masses). Before Adobe swallowed up its competitors to become the behemoth it is today, the other major players were Aldus, Altsys, Macromedia, Quark, and Xerox PARC.ĭepending on your age and tenure in graphic design, some of these names may sound familiar. One of the biggest players in the evolution of graphic design software is the current industry titan, Adobe Systems.

In this post, we’ll review the major players in the industry and the formative events and developments that have occurred since the 1970s.

The history of graphic design technology is anything but brief there’s an entire feature-length movie that barely scratches the surface. A Brief History of Graphic Design Software

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