Essential Industry Standard for Publishing Design
September 05, 2019
Essential Industry Standard for Publishing Design
Score 10 out of 10
Vetted Review
Verified User
Overall Satisfaction with Adobe InDesign
Adobe InDesign has been the primary document design application for Marketing since before I started 13 years ago. It is used almost exclusively by the in-house Creative Team I lead in Marketing, serving the design needs for the rest of the organization. InDesign allows our team to keep our collateral on brand with seamless integration with the other Adobe Creative Cloud design apps we use (primarily Illustrator and Photoshop).
- InDesign makes brand consistency easy with linked files, like logos and brand patterns. Any changes to linked files update across all documents that include them.
- InDesign's master page templates are essential for efficiency and consistency. They allow for easy addition of pages too long documents without having to set up guides and styles from scratch.
- InDesign's paragraph and character styles are particularly valuable for keeping long documents or series of related documents on brand typographically. When styles are properly set up, the need to manually format text is rare.
- I'm being pretty picky here about a product I love, but vector graphics copy/pasted from Illustrator often behave strangely and can be difficult to edit with InDesign's vector tools.
- Viewing documents in full resolution mode slows down the system far more than in other Adobe tools.
- No drawing or photo editing software (at least light tools for quick editing would sometimes be helpful).
- Design efficiency: those unfortunate occasions where our team is tasked with creating or editing on-brand Word documents prove the value of InDesign. Even basic typography takes 5X as long in other applications.
- Brand consistency: we launched a company rebrand, including a new name, in 2016, and the Creative Team was fanatical about ensuring complete brand consistency across ALL marketing collateral (mostly designed in InDesign). Within 12 months, our new company name had higher brand recognition than long-standing competitors, and even the visual brand was being recognized by the market, independent of the name. This speaks to the value of design consistency across materials seen by the market.
- Easy repetition: InDesign has made it incredibly easy to replicate previous design work as templates for new collateral, saving us hours of work creating collateral from scratch.
Microsoft Word is a standard business writing tool at ours and most companies, and we occasionally have to produce market-facing collateral using Word to allow for non-designers to easily customize it. We tried InCopy, but it was never adopted easily by Sales or other departments. Word, while providing flexibility to non-creatives, is a nightmare to design in, and is always a last resort for any design task. The same is true of Google Docs and Apple Pages.
QuarkXPress, which was the industry standard two decades ago for publishing software, hardly compares to InDesign now, and hasn't for more than a decade. It still exists and apparently serves its remaining customers well (mostly large publishers who invested too much into QuarkXPress processes to switch), but is largely irrelevant in the design world today.
Illustrator is an excellent alternative to InDesign's layout and typographic capabilities for short documents (e.g. one page), but falls short when multiple pages and sections are involved.
Do you think Adobe InDesign delivers good value for the price?
Yes
Are you happy with Adobe InDesign's feature set?
Yes
Did Adobe InDesign live up to sales and marketing promises?
Yes
Did implementation of Adobe InDesign go as expected?
Yes
Would you buy Adobe InDesign again?
Yes