Why I love Indesign, and so should you

Adobe Indesign is a tool I learned to love but that not many people are familiar with. I've often defended it in favor of other word publishing software and since I've been asked a few times why I like it or what it can do, I thought I'd write a couple of articles about Indesign, to give you a little introduction and see if you want to try it for yourself.

First, what is Indesign? Indesign is part of the Adobe Creative Suite package, it comes along with Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat. I explained the difference between the three tools in a previous post, but to summarize, Photoshop is to manipulate photos (although you can do much much more), illustrator is to create illustrations, and Indesign is to create documents.

What you can use Indesign for?

As mentioned earlier, Indesign is great for long publications, so if you are writing a book it would be the perfect choice, since you can save chapters as separate documents and bind them together in a single book. But there are other types of documents that are more commonly used by Marketers for which Indesign is very powerful. Here is a list of documents that I have created with Indesign: Product specifications Product catalogues User guides Work portfolio eBook Brochure

Just a quick note to give you an idea of who I saw using Indesign around me: Design agencies. Product Managers in a marketing team wanting to update their user guides without having to always rely on the designers for text updates. * My husband, CEO of his own startup, not wanting to pay a designer for every single change.

Why use Indesign over Word or other simple tools:

• Professional result: Indesign is really a tool conceived for professional designers so you can expect a real precision in terms of where and how you can place your text, images, what effect you can add, etc.. You can control every aspect of your publication.


• Integration with the Adobe Suite: if you are already used to work with Photoshop then you'll recognize a lot of functions in Indesign and the menu and keyboard shortcuts won't be completely new to you. The Adobe tools work very well together.


• Precised output formats: Once you have finalized your Indesign document you can prepare your pdf at the resolution you want, whether compressed for displaying on internet or high resolution for printing. You can control a variety of settings which give you, once again, a very professional result.

Things to be aware of before you start:

• Indesign can be a little bit complicated at first, there is a learning curve so be prepared to invest some time in the beginning to get yourself familiar with the tool.


• Collaboration on documents is not as easy as it is with Word. If you need someone else to review your document, they need to have Indesign as well, otherwise the only option you have is to print the document and have them mark it, or copy paste all the text in Word - which obviously you don't want to do.


• The way Indesign deals with images inserted in the document is quite different from what you are used to, so it is important to have your content well organized on your computer/server and develop a good discipline of sorting your files.

With this in mind, I'll give you a tour of Indesign in a coming post.

Question: which software do you mainly use for your publications?