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PageMaker Pioneer Paul Brainerd Dies at 78
Todd Bishop, writing at GeekWire:
Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing”
and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining
programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on
Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with
Parkinson’s disease. He was 78 years old.
He left two legacies. The first was a piece of software that put
the power of the printed page into the hands of millions of people
who had never operated a typesetting machine. The second was a
three-decade commitment to environmental conservation and
philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, pursuing it with the same
intensity he brought to the desktop publishing revolution.
Friends and colleagues this week remembered Brainerd as a quiet,
caring and detail-oriented leader with exacting standards. He
insisted that PageMaker use proper curly quotation marks instead
of straight ones, and obsessed over nuances such as kerning, the
precise spacing between specific letter pairs.
PageMaker was years ahead of its time, and was essential to igniting the desktop publishing revolution.
★
PageMaker pioneer Paul Brainerd, 1947-2026: Aldus founder devoted his second chapter to the planet
by Todd Bishop on Feb 19, 2026 at 10:49 amFebruary 26, 2026 at 10:10 am
Paul Brainerd at a Brainerd Foundation retreat in Montana. (Brainerd Foundation Photo)
In early 1984, Paul Brainerd and four engineers packed into his old Saab and another car and drove south on Interstate 5 from Seattle. They had been laid off after Kodak bought their employer, Atex, a company whose computerized text-processing systems let newspaper reporters and editors write and edit stories on video terminals instead of typewriters.
They had six months of savings, a rough idea for a piece of software, and no company name.
They stopped in towns along the way, pitching small newspapers and magazine publishers on a page-layout tool for desktop computers. The response was discouraging. The chains that were already buying up many of the publications took years to make purchasing decisions. A startup with six months of runway would be dead long before the first purchase order arrived.
They needed a new plan. They also needed a name: incorporation papers were due in a week.
What happened next was documented years later in oral history interviews with Brainerd for the Computer History Museum, and Seattle’s Museum of History and Industry.
They stopped at the Oregon State University library in Corvallis, rented a room, and started digging into books on the history of publishing. Brainerd found a chapter on Aldus Manutius, a 15th-century Venetian printer who had standardized typefaces, invented the small-book format, and brought the cost of publishing down far enough to reach ordinary people.
It was the perfect name for the revolution he had in mind.
Paul Brainerd, who went on to coin the term “desktop publishing” and build Aldus Corporation’s PageMaker into one of the defining programs of the personal computer era, died Sunday at his home on Bainbridge Island, Wash., after living for many years with Parkinson’s disease. He was 78 years old.
He left two legacies. The first was a piece of software that put the power of the printed page into the hands of millions of people who had never operated a typesetting machine. The second was a three-decade commitment to environmental conservation and philanthropy in the Pacific Northwest, pursuing it with the same intensity he brought to the desktop publishing revolution.
Paul Brainerd at the Aldus office in Seattle’s Pioneer Square neighborhood, on July 5, 1985. (David Healy Photo)
Friends and colleagues this week remembered Brainerd as a quiet, caring and detail-oriented leader with exacting standards. He insisted that PageMaker use proper curly quotation marks instead of straight ones, and obsessed over nuances such as kerning, the precise spacing between specific letter pairs.
“Everything he did, he did with integrity,” said Laura Urban Perry, who was art director of Seattle Weekly when she spotted an ad in the back of the paper, answered it, and became Aldus’ seventh employee in 1984 when it was based in a small office near the Pioneer Square pergola.
Brainerd sat her next to the engineers so design and development would be in constant conversation. In essence, she was working in user experience before the term was widely used. They gave her the desk by the window, she said, because artists need light.
Ben Rotholtz, who had worked at a Seattle art supply store selling press-on lettering to graphic designers, went to Aldus on Christmas Eve 1985 to apply for a tech support job. He laid out a page on an Apple Macintosh and watched it come out of an Apple LaserWriter exactly as it appeared on screen. (“My jaw just dropped,” he said.)
Rotholtz started at the company in January 1986. Many of the customers needing support had never owned a computer before. PageMaker was often the reason they bought one.
Before shipping PageMaker 3.0, Brainerd told Rotholtz that every department had signed off on the release except his. If tech support said it wasn’t ready, they wouldn’t ship. “Customer support was basically another feature in the product,” Rotholtz said. “He valued it that highly.”
Brainerd applied the same evenhanded principles to business partnerships. When Rotholtz proved to be an effective negotiator on technology licensing deals, Brainerd told him not to “over-negotiate” — to make sure the other side could survive and thrive, too.
That focus on customers is what revealed the true market for PageMaker. Brainerd and his team had expected to sell to professional graphic designers and newspaper publishers. Instead, the calls came from churches, colleges, nonprofits, and small businesses.
Brainerd loved to tell the story of a pastor from the Midwest who called to say he was using PageMaker to print 600,000 religious pamphlets. Or the mother in San Francisco who wrote to say she had used PageMaker to design and print a picture book for her children. It might seem trivial today, but back then it otherwise would have required a professional printer.
Telling those stories to the public was a core part of the company’s strategy, said Laury Bryant, who worked at Aldus from 1987 to 1991 as a PR and investor relations leader. “Every day, there was some new and incredible way the product was being used,” she said.
To Rotholtz, the product had a clear and profound impact on the world: “PageMaker was ultimately about the democratization of printing and publishing.”
Brainerd had lived the journey that made it possible.
****From letterpress to laser printer****
He was born in 1947 in Medford, Ore., a small town in the Rogue Valley with an economy dependent on pears and lumber. His parents, Phil and VerNetta Brainerd, ran a photography studio and camera shop on Main Street. He grew up in darkrooms in the family business.
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