In August 2025, Silicon Publishing will be celebrating 25 years as a company. This September will also mark 16 years since we launched our flagship product, Silicon Designer. But our story began much earlier. Our co-founders have roots going back to the 1990s, when the web was still in its infancy. Back then, we were already building some of the first tools for online editing of documents and images.
Silicon Publishing started as a custom software company, creating tailor-made solutions for clients on an hourly basis. Every project was unique, built to a client’s exact specifications. Therefore, the code always belonged to our clients, who branded the solutions we built as their very own. From the start, we were helping companies develop online editing tools for documents and graphics.
Then, in 2006, everything changed. We built a solution leveraging the newly released Adobe InDesign Server—and it took off. Our first major success was a template-based marketing tool for real estate agents, enabling them to create professional collateral through a web interface. Afterwards, we expanded rapidly, developing greeting card editors, menu makers, and ad builders—all powered by our unique online editing technology.
With the experience we had gained in these custom, one-off solutions, we embarked on a product development effort in 2007 and 2008. We presented our new product, Silicon Designer, to the “Print 09” conference in September of 2009. And almost immediately, we sold Designer to several large organizations.
At that time, prospects kept asking us, “can it be ‘white label?'” meaning, “can we put our name on it?” Competing solutions, such as PageFlex or XMPie uEdit, offered little if any customization or unique skinning to their clients.
Since we had never branded any of our work before, going white label made sense to us. From that time until today, Silicon Designer has never had its own branding. You can see many Designer implementations across the web, but you will never see our company’s name or the label “Silicon Designer”.
Not only was the branding defined by the client, but the client would often create their own UI design. Competitor solutions would tend to have a “one size fits all” interface, but we let our clients implement radically different user interfaces. Sometimes they would customize middle-tier and back-end functionality as well. As Designer evolved, we created “customization layers”. The goal was to enable clients to over-ride almost all product functionality, while still leveraging the core tech common across all implementations.
We had learned a ton from Adobe InDesign, which is one of the most extensible design tools to ever grace this earth. So our habit is to make our software extensible, and we applied this philosophy to Designer with passion. Virtually any part of the multi-tier system can be extended and changed at will, enabling our customers to truly differentiate themselves and tune the application to the needs of their client base.
Today, Silicon Designer is an online editing solution that takes the “white label” concept to the extreme. You can make it your own in terms of branding and naming. You can also customize the look and feel, or even the functionality. It is perhaps the most flexible editing tool in existence. We’ve hit a wide range of use cases, and always kept extensibility and ease of customization as top priorities. Some of our clients leave it to us to customize the product, while some do their own customization. Often the customization lands somewhere in the middle, as a collaborative effort between our development teams.
It is fun to see what clients come up with in their customizations: different document types and workflows have very different requirements. A school yearbook solution, for example, will tend to give users a free-form editor in which they can go wild. An editor for branded marketing collateral, at the other extreme, will need to constrain what users can do, enforcing brand guidelines (a salesperson can change the price, but not the font or formatting of that price).
I remember when the concept of “web services” arrived in the 1990s, replacing the ancient “Remote Procedure Calls (RPC). This made so much sense, and very rapidly became a noble goal in that most development shops were attempting to implement a service-oriented architecture.
The target was obvious: easy interoperation of software. In our case, Designer is just a module for online editing, as it doesn’t do e-commerce, it doesn’t do robust asset management, and it doesn’t usually house data. So we need to interface with:
During the past 25 years, we’ve seen interoperability get easier and easier, as standards, frameworks, and best practices have evolved. Silicon Designer easily connects to all of these things, providing RESTful services for all of its back-end functionality and JavaScript APIs for implementing the web client.
Since the 1990s, we have worked with VR, 3D imaging, and Artificial Intelligence, and we have been partnered with Adobe since inception. It is amazing to me that much of our current roadmap consists of functionality we envisioned decades ago. Dreams that have only now become possible.
As standards and technologies have evolved, Adobe has enjoyed a renaissance, returning to creative software as a major focus. Products like Express, Firefly, Substance, and the Photoshop API are advancing at a fast clip.
Leveraging both Open Source and Adobe technology, we are focused on the following new features:
It is not difficult to imagine Silicon Designer evolving steadily for another 16 years.
If you would like to learn more about Designer or try it for yourself, feel free to contact us.
