HI, the company that I work for has finally bought Adobe Illustrator 10 and photoshop 7, which we have been promised for a long time. They have also installed Adobe InDesign 2.0.2 on my mac.
The problem is this, neither myself or my fellow designers here have ever used InDesign before and can see no use for it. it must have cost alot of money and therefore there must be a use.
So my question is this: What is the main purpose of InDesign? Is this a ‘missing link’ that will make all future designs quicker, easier and better? Illustrator is for drawing, protoshop is for altering images, what does this InDesign do?
InDesign is one of Adobe’s layout programs, the other being Pagemaker (now on its seventh version). You see, layout programs have been missing what would be considered simple effects and tools for a long time now. InDesign is notable for adding transparency effects along with blend modes (which you probably know all about from Photoshop). Another small but cool feature is optical (as opposed to metrical) kerning, which spaces the text perfectly. In my experience, InDesign can make some beautiful looking typography (it supports open type fonts) and amazing effects, but isn’t quite as easy or fast to use for simple, non-graphics-intense layout projects like a school newspaper.
If you’re on Mac OS X at work, PageMaker isn’t available. I’m almost postive it’s being abondoned in favor of InDesign. I think the same goes for FrameMaker, which was always prized in technical publishing circles. A lot of geeks seem to go crazy for TeX systems, but I’ve never played with it at all. TeX is a free (beer, speech) page layout system that’s supposedly awesome.
It’s Adobe’s countermove to QuarkXPress. It’s for page layout. Some of the advantages:
it can fully exploit Adobe’s new Opentype fonts, which most programs can’t
it can export directly to PDF, making distribution faster and easier and “collecting for output” a hell of a lot easier (i.e., making sure that the professional printer you send your files to doesn’t use the wrong font and screw up all of the line breaks, etc.)
it’s from Adobe, so it has much better support from the manufacturer than does Quark, who are basically a bunch of *****. That’s why my company (a magazine publisher) is switching to InDesign from QuarkXPress.
And it’s possible that InDesign didn’t cost your company a lot–it comes bundled with Photoshop and Illustrator in one of those “Design Collections”, so buying all three is usu. cheaper than just buying Photoshop and Illustrator separately.
Graphic designer of 10 years checking in here. In addition to my regular job, I have had a stint where I taught Illustrator, Photoshop and Quark.
InDesign is a very promising program. It’s a bit slower than QuarkXPress, but the feature set is far superior. If you are familiar with Illustrator and Photoshop, you will be able to find your way around InDesign in no time.
Quark 6 will be coming out for OS X this year (they say). We will see how it compares not just to InDesign but to previous versions of itself. Personally my money’s on InDesign in the long run based on two factors: Adobe is very resonsive to the requests of it’s customers and improves their products on a regular basis (a practice which has been foreign to Quark) and the fact that just over a decade ago, Quark was able to dethrone PageMaker the bedrock graphic application that launched the notion of doing graphic design on a computer. InDesign is to QuarkXPress as QuarkXPress was to PageMaker. At the least, it’s probably not a bad idea to become familiar with it.
I run the prepress operation at a commerical printer. Even though Quark 5 has been out for over a year, I have only 2 (out of several hundred) customers who have bothered to upgrade from v4.11. I am seeing more ID files. In my estimation, the market is starting to turn its back on quark.
Plus it integrates well with other adobe apps, as well as handles tranparency almost seamlessly.
The Quark 6 Beta FINALLY has multiple undo, but so did 5’s beta (not in the final version). I’d say Quark has lost any loyalty in my book due to their sheer pigheaded buttheadedness. But then again, they gained my loyalty in the first place due to Adobe’s sheer pigheaded buttheadedness in the early days of PageMaker (does anyone remember when they were king?). It’s looking like a game of sheer pigheaded butthead ping pong.
Quick clarification:
In the early days of PageMaker, the pigheaded buttheadedness was by a company called “Aldus,” the original publisher of PageMaker. They went under in the mid-nineties and their assets were snatched up by Adobe (PageMaker) and Macromedia (FreeHand, Fontographer).
Dear gawd, I had attempted to remove the scarring in my brain caused by Aldus by wiping that name from all snynapsis. Now, thanks to Hey you! I am forced to type this while lying in a pool of drool and twitching.