Olav Martin Kvern
Seattle, Washington
Olav Martin Kvern has spent his career at the intersection of graphic design and automation, starting in the 1970s as a scientific illustrator (veterinary, archaeological) before moving to Seattle to work in illustration, design, and typesetting. Early on, he began writing code to automate his own production work, first on a Compugraphic typesetter and then on an Interleaf system, where he programmed in BASIC and Interpress, a precursor of PostScript. That instinct, using code to take the drudgery out of publishing, has defined everything since.
In 1987 he joined Aldus, where he moved from documentation into PageMaker engineering, helped design PageMaker's Control panel, and championed its scripting support. He co-wrote Real World PageMaker and Real World FreeHand, and his long-running "Desktop Science" column in Aldus Magazine and later Adobe Magazine taught a generation of designers to automate their work with AppleScript, PostScript, and Visual Basic. He went on to program the intelligence behind Visio's SmartShapes as the company's "ShapeMaster," served as an art director at Peachpit Press, and founded a plug-in development company, Desktop Science, that built tools for Extensis and Wizards of the Coast.
Kvern joined Adobe in 1999 to lead InDesign scripting documentation and evangelism, and left a lasting mark on the product: he originated the ideas for both IDML and InDesign Server, built the forum that became the hub of the InDesign automation community, and wrote Real World InDesign, later collaborating with David Blatner on subsequent editions. His guiding principle is that scripting belongs to every designer, not just programmers, because it frees creative people from repetitive work. Since 2011 he has been at Silicon Publishing, contributing to nearly every product release, including a system that round-trips InDesign typesetting to HTML5 and back in Silicon Designer.
