Overview – Shaping the Creative Landscape for 40+ Years
Founded in 1982 by former Xerox researchers John Warnock and Charles Geschke, Adobe began with a pioneering vision of making desktop publishing accessible to anyone with a personal computer. Their PostScript technology kickstarted desktop printing and publishing, enabling broad adoption of these capabilities through licensing to major partners like Apple.
Adobe then leveraged its publishing foundation to launch revolutionary creative software tools over the next decades – radically transforming workflows for graphics, photography, illustration, video and more. Flagship offerings like Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro and Acrobat Reader have become global standards relied upon by millions of creative professionals.
The company’s relentless pace of innovation continued into the 2000s with acquisitions expanding capabilities into digital marketing alongside tools for emerging mediums. Then in 2011, Adobe made a game-changing transition to delivering its tools via Creative Cloud – accelerating release cycles, facilitating team collaboration and massively lowering barriers to access.
Today, over 30 million subscribers make Adobe the undisputed leader powering creativity globally across graphic design, photography, videography and beyond. With cutting-edge AI capabilities on the horizon, the company that defined desktop publishing is poised to shape the future of creativity once again. This is the story of that remarkable journey.
The Revolutionary Promise of PostScript
When John Warnock and Chuck Geschke began developing PostScript in the late 1970s, they envisioned empowering anyone to design professional-grade content right from their personal computers. This was an ambitious goal in that era when specialized typesetting equipment still dominated publishing.
The pair believed translating documents into print required software intelligence about shapes, fonts and graphics – not just dumping raw character data to printers. So they set out to create a page description language conveying precise visual positioning and attributes independent of specific devices.
By 1982, Warnock and Geschke had made enough progress to found Adobe and commercialize PostScript. In 1985, Apple embraced PostScript for its revolutionary LaserWriter – instantly catapulting PostScript to become the industry standard for desktop publishingoutput just as the Macintosh took off. This early coup made Adobe’s fortune while establishing its brand as the authority on desktop publishing software.
Number of PostScript Licenses
| Year | # of PostScript Licenses |
|-|-|-|
| 1984 | 15 |
| 1985 | 100 |
| 1986 | 500 |
| 1987 | 1,000+|
Buoyed by rapid adoption, Adobe turned its sights toward creative softwaretargeting graphics professionals. Warnock foresaw desktop publishing expanding beyond just text – but inclusive rich images, illustrations, photographs and videos. Once again, the vision was prescient.
Unleashing Unparalleled Creativity with Illustrator and Photoshop
While PostScript laid the publishing foundation, Adobe’s subsequent influence stemmed from profoundly impacting creative workflows across every medium.
It began in 1987 with Adobe Illustrator – the first widely adopted vector graphics software enabling illustrators to precisely draw and adjust lines, shapes and logos on desktop computers. This delivered unprecedented versatility over traditional pen and paper or technical drawing tools.
Illustrator arrived alongside the desktop publishing boom, giving creators powerful new options for illustrations, graphic design, technical drawings and more. Adoption swelled globally throughout the late 1980s and 1990s as Illustrator added features like gradient mesh editing and PDF support.
Next came Adobe Photoshop which brought image editing and production capabilities never before possible. Originally created by PhD student Thomas Knoll in 1987, Adobe quickly recognized Photoshop’s potential and acquired rights to the application.
The first version shipped in 1990, instantly changing photography and raster graphics. Photoshop empowered fine-tuned adjustments across exposure, color balance and numerous enhancements through breakthrough layers technology. This allowed non-destructive editing of images for the first time. Suddenly artists and photographers gained incredible creative freedom.
Just as Illustrator opened new possibilities for illustration, Photoshop redefined photographic expression – rapidly becoming essential to every graphic designer. These tools marked some of history’s most influential software for unlocking human creativity. And Adobe continued this trend…
Streamlining Digital Documents with Acrobat Reader
Adobe Acrobat Reader first arrived in 1993 promising to ease business document sharing by giving users a reliable way to view and print PDF files identically across any platform. This helped PDF emerge as a universal standard for digital documents – allowing content creators to produce rich reports, catalogs, brochures and more while enabling seamless distribution.
By ensuring perfect visual fidelity and adding capabilities like form filling, digital signatures, comment workflows and document encryption, Acrobat became integral for official paperwork and contracts. Acrobat Reader’s freemium strategy helped drive rapid enterprise and consumer adoption through the 1990s.
Enabling seamless PDF workflows would prove crucial to Adobe’s success as businesses shifted toward digital-first operations over the next decades. Once again, Adobe anticipated where work was heading – delivering the right software at the right time.
Dominating Video Production with Premiere and After Effects
Beyond revolutionizing design and photography, Adobe also set its sights on video and motion graphics – markets long underserved before the multimedia boom of the 1990s.
Adobe Premiere, acquired and released in 1991, targeted professional cinematic editing providing tools tailored to assemble multi-scene feature movies or television shows. Premiere quickly became industry standard for major studios.
Then in 1993, Adobe tackled visual effects, motion design and animated content creation with After Effects. Offering sophisticated tools for keyframing, particle generation, motion tracking and other animation techniques, After Effects provided unmatched control compared to traditional techniques. It fast became essential for graphic-intensive video projects like news segments, advertisements and music videos in the MTV generation.
By the late 1990s, Premiere and After Effects put Adobe at the epicenter of audiovisual media as well – establishing complete domination over major creative software markets from images to video.
The 2000s – Mass Adoption through Creative Suite
With expertise spanning print, graphics, photography, illustration and video by the 2000s, Adobe faced rising complexity accommodating diverse workflows across its multitude of products. Realizing integration was imperative, the company bundled its major applications into integrated suites.
Creative Suite launched in 2003 unifying tools for design, web and video professionals:
- Creative Suite Design bundled flagship apps Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign
- Creative Web Suite combined Dreamweaver, Flash and ColdFusion web technologies
- Creative Suite Production Studio integrated Premiere Pro, After Effects and Audition
These thoughtfully curated combinations streamlined workflow for creatives, establishing Creative Suite as the industry essentials package over the decade. Simplified integration and learning between products drove widespread adoption beyond niche specialists to whole creative teams.
Annual Creative Suite Units Sold
| Year | Units Sold |
|---|---|
| 2005 | ~250,000 |
| 2009 | ~500,000 |
| 2012 | ~1.5 million |
With accessible pricing bundles paired with seamless interoperability, Creative Suite marked the apex of Adobe‘s desktop publishing dominance – achieving near ubiquity worldwide by 2012.
Yet even while Creative Suite sales soared, Adobe saw the future shifting to cloud connectivity and subscription access. Once more they moved to redefine their market…
Embracing the Cloud with Creative Cloud
By the early 2010s, distribution and delivery of software had fundamentally changed. With cloud connectivity emerging as the next revolution, Adobe transitioned to delivering its tools through Creative Cloud – a subscription service guaranteeing users perpetual access to the latest updates of flagship applications like Photoshop, Illustrator and Premiere Pro alongside periodic early releases.
This transition from packaged one-time purchases to continually updated products opened tremendous new value for users while securing recurring revenue. With cloud storage facilitating seamless file access and collaboration across teams, Creative Cloud vastly expanded accessibility to Adobe’s premium tools.
The effects were tremendous, vastly increasing adoption from over 3 million Creative Suite users to a current 30+ million Creative Cloud subscribers and counting.
Creative Cloud Paid Subscribers
| Year | Subscribers |
|---|---|
| 2013 | 1 million |
| 2016 | 7 million |
| 2021 | 30+ million |
Creative Cloud has kept Adobe firmly established as one of the world‘s most relied upon creative software providers for over 10 years now. With subscribers automatically receiving improvements as soon as available, Adobe maintains its commanding mindshare – continually expanding capabilities to match user needs.
Recent years have seen introduction of further tools like Adobe XD for UX/UI design alongside niche offerings tailored for photography, illustration and animation. Integration has reached new levels through cloud libraries that automatically sync assets like colors, character styles and brushes universally across Windows and Mac applications.
By pioneering subscription access paired with continuous product improvement across its unmatched range of creative applications, Adobe has profoundly impacted the careers of tens of millions of subscribers – firmly cementing itself at the center of today’s booming creative economy.
And with AI-enhancements like automatically masking objects in video and one-click background replacement coming soon to Photoshop and Premiere Pro, Adobe’s next wave of innovation already takes shape – promising to further revolutionize creative work in the years ahead.
The Past and Future of Creativity
From pioneering PostScript bringing desktop publishing to the masses to inventions like Photoshop, Illustrator and PremierePro that redefined creative industries – Adobe’s 40 year journey has been marked by determined technological innovation to expand human creativity.
Time and again, Adobe anticipated needs before others recognized opportunity – only to develop breakthroughs advancing how we access and interact with ideas. By refusing to settle on the status quo, Adobe shaped creative revolutions elevating global visual communication generation over generation.
Today Adobe sits at the forefront enabling over 30 million subscribers worldwide to freely explore creative passions while building careers around their talents. Technologies on the horizon promise to lower more barriers than ever – opening new dimensions of creative potential.
If the past four decades are any precedent, we should expect Adobe to trailblaze these creative frontiers just as boldly as they have every era that came before. The company’s enduring legacy stems not just from universally popular innovations, but relentless commitment to empower and inspire imagination in all who dream. That is the essence of the Adobe story.
