Adobe MAX 2019 and the new Silicon Designer

The new Silicon Designer is scheduled for release in January of 2020. We are very happy with the state of the product and its direction. Silicon Publishing people are fresh from the Adobe MAX conference, where David Blatner showed Designer in one of his InDesign presentations, so we had a webinar to show the things we thought were cool at MAX and the state of our product, which has seen steady advances over the past two years.

Following is an overview of the webinar along with links to related information.

The Best of Adobe Max 2019

Adobe MAX was packed this year, with nearly 20,000 attendees from around the world converging in Los Angeles. Some highlights:

• Creativity for all, on the go: Photoshop on the iPad is officially released, with Illustrator on the iPad coming soon…
• InDesign turned 20: Shantanu called out this milestone in his keynote…
• XD Features continued to expand: impressive XD features were released…
• As usual, celebrities and famous designers/artists were there: we especially enjoyed Billie Eilish & Takashi Murakami…
• The traditional Sneak Peaks were again inspiring: particularly Project About Face…

All in all, a great MAX conference…

I have to admit that our favorite moment at the conference was seeing David Blatner explain InDesign Server…

Silicon Designer: InDesign for the Rest of Us

For anyone new to Silicon Designer, a quick overview may be in order…

The idea is not to replace InDesign… Instead, it is to enable non-designers…

We pride ourselves on several principles that have guided this platform for well over a decade:

• We have de-coupled the behaviors of the application from the user interface…
• We support web-based editing through modern, standards-based approaches…
• We build Silicon Designer in a modular way with RESTful services and JS interfaces…
• We use the powerful InDesign engine via InDesign Server…
• We use InDesign templates to define the editing experience at a granular level…

As I explained in my post Five Considerations in User Interface for Online Design…

The New Silicon Designer

We have spent the past 2 years on two major threads of activity to advance our Silicon Designer product:

• Robust WYSIWYG, on-canvas editing (multi-select, alignment tools, transparency effects, etc.)
• Scalable, brand-driven form-based editing for less design-heavy use cases

We now offer more client-side features than ever before…

See how simply Silicon Designer makes creating beautiful creative design and marketing content to everyone in your organization: book a free expert consultation now.

The Silicon Designer Roadmap

As highlighted in the webinar, we have big things underway:

• Unified server-based and on-canvas client-side editing
• More robust Starter Kit with API exposure
• Long document editing features
• Semantic XML and story-based authoring
• 2D/3D visualization tools for mugs, shirts, and 3D printing
• Integration with variable data publishing
• Deeper Creative Cloud and Marketing Cloud integration

As always, we are driven by the goals of our clients and partners…