Silicon Publishing has been building online design solutions since our inception in the year 2000: in our previous life at Bertelsmann, we had pioneered the web itself (building Intel’s first web site, for example), including the very first server-based generation of dynamic PDF. In 2009, we announced Silicon Designer, which was an instant success. That year, we also found ourselves working with Amazon, Hallmark, Shutterfly, Minted, and several other household names, thanks in large part to interest in our new product.
In a wonderful coincidence, Adobe moved the InDesign product to India right when we desperately needed developers. When we hired a Who’s Who of the Seattle-based Adobe InDesign team, we really got good at online editing, and were actually able to deliver solutions worthy of such serious clients and partners.
Silicon Designer lets you edit Adobe InDesign documents in WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) fashion in a web browser, then generate high-quality print output of your edits using Adobe InDesign Server. We accomplished this by painstakingly reconciling web and print object models. Thanks to the deep graphic and typographic skills of our developers, we do this very well, and we do it at an ever-greater scale. Some of our customers produce millions of documents per day.
As Designer deployments grew in scale, we encountered more and more asset management systems. One in particular, Day CQ, really stood out, and we were excited to build an integration between Silicon Designer and Day CQ in 2010. Day Software looked like a fantastic new partner. However, they were soon acquired by Adobe, who turned their technology into the basis of Adobe Experience Manager Assets (AEM Assets), which quickly became a leading enterprise DAM.
Silicon Designer for AEM is our integration of Designer and AEM, which lets AEM users add online InDesign editing capability to their AEM solution. For example, a salesperson can edit just the price of a product on a flyer, without being able to change the design characteristics of the document. Documents created with Designer can go through review and approval workflows with either AEM or Workfront.
We have seen several organizations enjoy the combination of these two technologies. As we head to the 2024 Adobe Summit this week, we’re looking forward to demonstrating the latest features of Designer for AEM, which include integration with two hot new Adobe creative technologies: Express and Firefly.
If you are also attending Summit, feel free to make an appointment to meet with us, or stop by our booth (#591 B). Online design and asset management are more exciting now than at any time in human history.