Adobe InDesign is used mainly for drafting layouts and creating templates that can be uniform across multiple pages at once. Its specialty is text based projects, because it has multiple kinds of text box templates and will duplicate in multiple pages. InDesign allows more than one page to be worked on at a time, without strictly using layers or creating a whole separate project. Because the software produces more than one page to work on, InDesign is best worked on projects that are layouts that could be printed. For example: flyers, brochures, résumés, business cards, and magazines.
How to best use InDesign:
- Good with template creating because lines and text are more editable in indesign.
- New templates can be downloaded and upload to InDesign
- More text and typography options
- Indesign can work in many pages at once as well as layers (changes within layers will edit all pages to be changed the same way)
- After creating an image/logo in Illustrator, or editing a photo in Photoshop, images can be dropped into an InDesign project, and text can be formatted to interact with or around the image.
- Can create tables, graphs, layouts, cells, and assign specific sections for project needs.
Compare:
InDesign vs Illustrator and Photoshop
- InDesign is good for printed projects (documents mostly) – can split in pages and layers
- Photoshop and Illustrator is usually a one page project, but can have many layers
- InDesign has a feature where it can edit images and create designs using Illustrator and Photoshop WITHIN the InDesign platform. Instead of opening a new software, it can make a small window to edit designs and photos within the document
- There are a lot of things that both programs can do, but InDesign presents an advantage when dealing with text formatting and text layouts.
- Illustrator is much better used for creating text effects and vector images within the document