
InDesign does give you the ability to draw vector graphics, like those you might find in a logo, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what you can do with Illustrator. For one, it doesn’t have any photo editing capabilities. While InDesign is a powerful tool, it does have its limitations. It does this so that you can hand off these materials to your printer and they can make your layout work in the exact manner that you intended. InDesign, however, packages everything for you – all of your fonts and images. However, in doing so, they often create files that are needlessly huge or put together in ways that are not optimal for commercial printers to use. People can, and do, put together layouts with Photoshop or Illustrator. Its text wrap functionality (where you can literally wrap text around images or objects) is much simpler and easier to use than it is in Illustrator. InDesign excels at projects that require multi-page layouts or master layouts where one theme reoccurs on multiple pages. Its purpose is to take the elements that you create in Illustrator and Photoshop and put them together in one place. Virtually anything that is made up of a combination of blocks of text, photos or other artwork. This could be brochures, newsletters, ads, business cards or books. There should be no confusion about when to use InDesign – its specific purpose is for laying out printed materials that’s what it is designed to do.

#Adobe illustrator vs indesign software
You’ll want to focus your attention on the piece of software that is most relevant to what your goals, and then apply that knowledge to the other two.

So what I’ll be doing in this post is breaking down the three pieces of design software from Adobe – InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop and explaining when to use them.īy examining them in this way, you can see what your specific needs are, this should help you to decide what program you’ll start learning. Just like a plumber would use the right wrench for the job, each program has a specific area that it excels at. While it’s expected that pros should know this information, someone who’s cracking open the software for the first time might not even be aware that there are instances where you should be using one over the other. It could be anything from using Adobe Illustrator instead of InDesign for layout or a logo that has been put together using Photoshop. One of the things that can be frustrating to creative professionals is receiving files that have been put together using the wrong piece of design software. Would you choose a plumber that uses a saw, when what he really needs is a wrench?
