Item: Adobe InDesign
Rating: 9
Author: Verified User

Overall Satisfaction with Adobe InDesign

Use Cases and Deployment Scope

We use Adobe InDesign mainly for self promotional products such as marketing brochures and customer proposals. It is being used by the design team for jobs that need the finest control and execution from concept to print. It is the tool to use when the product needs to look exactly how you expect.

Pros and Cons

Pros

Character and object styles are essential. With these two features you can save hours of work going through multi-page documents and manually reformatting individual elements.
Powerful PDF generation. Not only can you generate consistently well laid out documents, but you can incorporate specific PDF features. For instance, you can create a table of contents with text links that go right to the page in the PDF.
The ability to pre-flight and package projects for print is such a relief. You don't need to manually hunt down fonts and resources to send to your printer, it can all be buttoned up and print ready.

Cons

There is a lot of overlap in the Adobe content creation apps. You can make a block of text in Photoshop, Illustrator, or InDesign. And while tools are generally similar, things can be a bit jarring when going from one package to another. It is understandable that they are different tools attacking different problems, but any steps that can be take to smooth the functionality would be appreciated.
Cost. With so much of the software world going open source, it can feel weird shelling out for a program. That being said, if your need is an InDesign problem, there is NO alternative and it is worth every penny
Learning curve. There is a tremendous amount of documentation and user guides out there. But the fact is, this program is a monster. If it is not your job to create professional documents, you will not have the time or motivation to master Adobe InDesign.

Return on Investment

For a relatively low cost, we are able to produce professional documents in house without having to farm out to a designer.
If we didn't already have people experienced with Adobe InDesign it wouldn't provide good ROI. It is a software package that needs qualified employees and if you don't already have one, that can be a large cost...
If you use other Adobe products more frequently and have a blanket license that includes InDesign the cost gets mitigated to basically zero.

Usability

If you know what you are doing it is an amazingly granular and powerful application. You can control pretty much any aspect of the design and layout of your documents and make changes globally and rapidly. But, if you don't know what you are doing...you will be staring at your screen in bewilderment for a long time. You can learn it, but be ready for a hefty time investment.

Support Rating

Adobe has a long history of top-notch support and the products are consistently stable while still handling large and very taxing files. They have historically been very responsive to the market and they value their users greatly. It could be easy for a company that has such a commanding presence in their given market to let these things slide, but they haven't done that. Adobe clearly wants to remain number one.

Alternatives Considered

There aren't even any worthy of mentioning. There is an open-source Scribus, or Microsoft solutions like Word and Publisher. But those shouldn't be used in the same breadth as InDesign. Are you sending a document to a professional press? You use InDesign. I really do wish there was some market options here but the fact is that right now, Adobe InDesign is it.

Other Software Used

Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator CC, Adobe Acrobat DC

Likelihood to Recommend

If you need this tool, there simply isn't any other program to recommend. And if you don't need it, it is a waste of time and money to invest in it. For this reason I don't know that I would recommend it to anybody. If somebody would need this tool to do their work, they would already have it.

Comments

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