date: 'Monday, August 19 2024' title: 'Diving Into Adobe InDesign' description: "Adobe's InDesign software is the current industry standard for desktop publishing. Dive into InDesign and learn about its advantages and drawbacks." image: 'indesign-genai_idzvxu' author: 'Brian T. Sullivan' editor: 'Lindsey Woldt'

category: 'learn'

Diving Into Adobe InDesign

Written by Brian T. Sullivan • Edited by Lindsey Woldt

Once upon a time, books were very expensive and time-consuming to make. For one thing, you had to copy everything out by hand with things like quills and brushes. Then, printing techniques were developed. These methods sped-up the process of getting text (and images) onto paper, but it still took a lot of time to carve the blocks or assemble the movable type by hand.

Nowadays, designing books and other published material is quite a bit easier. It's still work, and a lot of skill and talent can go into designing making a book, but desktop publishing software, like Adobe InDesign, has streamlined the process in many ways.

This has empowered more people to design books and other published material, and it has offered creative choices that were once impractical, if not impossible.

What Is Desktop Publishing?

Put simply, desktop publishing (DTP) is using a computer to typeset and layout text, along with any images, with the intention that these documents will then be reproduced and distributed. This material is usually meant to be printed, like physical books, magazines, fliers, etc., but it can also sometimes be digital, like e-books.

While traditional publishers often use DTP software nowadays, its use in self-publishing is extremely important. Individuals can use DTP software to create and share their own creative work, like novels or zines, and businesses can use DTP software to produce various promotional and internal materials, like sales pamphlets or employee handbooks.

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Why Use Adobe InDesign?

Adobe's InDesign software is the current industry standard for desktop publishing.

If you're an employer trying to pick what DTP software to buy, this means you can reasonably expect your design team to be familiar with the software and able to hit the ground running when using it.

If you're a designer, or an aspiring designer, this means that a future employer will likely expect you to be familiar with the software. There seems to be a bit of a chicken-and-the-egg situation here, but we won't worry about that.

InDesign Features

InDesign has a large feature set that allows you to use it in a lot of different ways. Most simply, InDesign can create a document with specified page dimensions and then fill those pages with text. You can customize how that text is laid out, choose the fonts, and create "Parent" page layouts that can ensure consistent formatting for things like page numbers or background colors and designs.

If you want to move into more advanced features, InDesign allows you to specify certain text formats for things like chapter titles or body text by way of Paragraph and Character Styles. These sorts of automation features are what make InDesign (and a lot of other DTP software) so powerful.

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It not only makes it easier to keep things like chapter titles and body text formatted consistently, but also means you can adjust the settings for a Paragraph Style and it will instantly update any text set to use that style. On top of that, InDesign can automatically generate a table of contents of an index for you assuming you've labeled things correctly in your book.

Another useful feature of InDesign is its export functionality, which can give you many options when exporting the material so that your document will be ready for whatever your printing/distribution process will be.

Is InDesign For Text Only?

Nope!

I make comics, and after trying to design my first volume of comics by just designing each page manually in Photoshop, I can't even begin to describe how much better it was when I shifted to using InDesign.

It handles full-page images well, but it also works well for adding illustrations for otherwise text-heavy documents. You can also easily design books for color or black-and-white printing.

InDesign Drawbacks

Seeing as this article is not an ad for Adobe software, it's important to acknowledge some of the things about InDesign that are less than ideal. These can help you consider whether alternatives might be a better fit for your needs.

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Cost

Adobe InDesign is a subscription software. For only InDesign, a subscription is $22.99/month (USD) as of August 2024, which equates to $275.80/year. If you use other Adobe software, you might find the Creative Cloud All Apps plan to be a better deal at $59.99.

Either way, if your projects don't require all of the fancy features that InDesign offers, or you're willing to do things by hand, you might want to consider alternatives.

Note that students and teachers can get discounts on Adobe software. That's good, but arguably also how they get you hooked.

Learning Curve

Although InDesign is a What You See is What You Get (WYSIWYG) program, it is also pretty complicated to use. It doesn't make many of its features readily apparent, and until you learn about the features (and get good at googling how to accomplish certain things), you'll find that you aren't taking full advantage of all the power this tool has available.

Should You Use InDesign?

Depending on what you're trying to do, I think InDesign can be worth it.

Of Adobe's various Creative Cloud programs, I personally find InDesign to be one of the best and most useful. I have personally designed four 100+ page books and a 20-page pamphlet in it, with three more books in various stages of production, and while it definitely took time to get the hang of it, it has become a pleasure to use.

At the same time, though, it is probably overkill for many people's DTP needs. If you're just getting started, it may be better to start with a cheaper (or free) alternative, and then consider getting InDesign if you need features that only it has to offer. Or if you need to use other Adobe software, get it bundled with the rest.

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