Adobe InDesign CS2 would have been InDesign version 4 if Adobe had not renamed it for the Creative Suite. Where InDesign Came FromA lot of history is behind InDesign. It started way back in 1986, when a company called Aldus introduced PageMaker, a ground-breaking program (most likely responsible for the era that would define the term desktop publishing) that enabled users to lay out pages on a computer screen and set type. As PageMaker evolved, it lost ground in the professional design community to competitor QuarkXPress. Adobe took ownership of PageMaker in 1994, but the technology that it was based on was limited in what it could do. Adobe began work on what it dubbed "the Quark Killer," which was code-named K2. When K2 was finally named InDesign 1.0 and launched in 1999, it was greeted with little fanfare. Sure, there was hype, but being a version 1.0 product, it simply had too many issues that prevented people from using it. When Adobe released InDesign 2.0 in January 2001, it was a whole new ballgame. Fast-forward to the present, and the battle ensues between QuarkXPress and InDesignalthough, if you read the press reviews or the various forums on the Internet, Adobe already seems to have won the battle. There is a definite turn of the tide in today's industry, as both designers and printers continue to move to adopt InDesign. What InDesign DoesInDesign is generally called a page-layout program. Also dubbed an aggregate tool, InDesign basically enables you to gather content that was created in other applications and position the elements on a page to create a completed design. For example, to create a page of a catalog, you'd set up a page in InDesign, place a product photo you touched up in Photoshop, place the company logo you created in Illustrator, and import some text from Microsoft Word (see Figure 2.11). When you had the elements on the page, you could experiment with your design, moving the items around and adjusting them to complete your page design. Figure 2.11. Working with different elements on a page in InDesign.Whether you're producing a magazine, a newsletter, or a brochure, nothing is more important than the way the text looks on your page. InDesign has many strengths, but typography is definitely first on that list because it was built to set perfect type quickly and consistently. A professional designer pays close attention to how a paragraph of text reads. Things such as kerning and tracking (the amount of spacing between letters and words), justification (how text lines up to the margins), leading (pronounced "ledding," the amount of space between lines), and the number of hyphens can make the difference between a block of text that's easy to read and one that gives the reader a headache (see Figure 2.12). Various special characters such as curly quotes and ligatures (special character combinations such as fi, ffi, fl, and ffl) can really make an impact on the visual appearance of text as well. Figure 2.12. The difference between good (right) and bad (left) typography.Adobe InDesign offers features such as paragraph styles that enable you to store all the information we just talked about, as well as specify font attributes, size, color, and moreall in a setting you can apply with one click of a button. For example, you can have paragraph styles (see Figure 2.13) set up for how you want a headline, body text, or a caption to look and have any text in your document match those attributes instantly. Figure 2.13. InDesign's Paragraph Styles palette.What really makes InDesign shine above the competition is how it fits with all the things you need to do in the design process (something called workflow), which we talk about in intimate detail in Chapter 3. But just to give you an idea of what we're talking about, InDesign understands native files from other applications in the Creative Suite, so you can easily drop native Illustrator, Photoshop, and PDF files into your InDesign layout. InDesign also exports PDF files directly, letting you effortlessly send proofs to clients or co-workers for review and approval. Of course, InDesign contains a lot more than professional type tools. Here's a sample of the kinds of tools and features you'll find in InDesign CS:
Now that you have a better understanding of what InDesign can do, let's discuss when you should use it. When to Use InDesignInDesign is perfect for various tasks, including the following:
After discussing how InDesign is used, you should have a better understanding of why it's called an aggregate tool, gathering content from different sources to complete a layout. Although InDesign is also capable of handling complete projects from scratch on its own, it is usually better to use InDesign's Edit Original feature to link graphics and edit them in the apps that handle specialized tasks better. Although InDesign does have an innovative feature called Package for GoLive that can help you repurpose content from a print job to be used on a website (which we discuss in detail in Chapter 9, "Using Adobe GoLive CS2"), don't mistake InDesign for a web design tool. |