It’s no surprise that as software tech improves, new file formats get whipped up to cope with the waves of standards that tangle developers. Sure thing. I get that.
But that doesn’t mean new format standards are any more convenient for end users — especially when they can be used as leverage to soft-force consumers into buying the latest and greatest software. Microsoft proved that with their annoying “.docx” format in the latest iterations of Word, replacing everyone’s trusty “.doc” format and confusing office-dwellers everywhere.
But another software giant has pulled the same move. And I made a quick Venn diagram to illustrate the cacophony.
(Check out the full-resolution version here.)
Enter Adobe. Every creative-type knows the Adobe Creative Suite as the juggernaut in the design community; you literally can’t work without their products. Adobe InDesign has long been the mainstay in print design (sorry, Quark); but as they’ve graduated through the past three versions of the software, each one has reformatted InDesign’s “.indd” file type such that it can’t be read by previous versions. What?
Simply put: InDesign CS4 can’t read an “.indd” from InDesign CS5. And CS3 can’t read CS4 or CS5. Want to create backwards-compatible files? Sure: just export into one of these random other file types, which they’ve also changed over time. Simple!
Ah, what simplicity we sacrifice in the name of progress.
A bit of background: my friend Marian Chiao put together this rapid-prototyping project site Buildhappy as a way to spur short-but-sweet ideas amongst design community members. Each week is a new set of prompts, so I submitted this sketch as an initial thumbnail. There should be more to come; In practice, sites like this are a great idea. While most of my weeks are spent these days on client projects, spending a half hour one evening on quick sketches like this can really loosen up your thoughts.