Indesign versus illustrator

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Pablo317

New Member
New to graphics , I get that illustrator uses Ai files and other vector files , however can someone explain the big differences from illustrator and indesign , why are the functions not merged Into one program ,Or am I missing the point , like I say I'm a novice
 
Illustrator is primarily for illustrating stuff and indesign is for designing & laying stuff out. For example you couldn't use indesign to work on a complex gradient mesh & you couldn't use illustrator to publish an 8 page brochure with photographs.
 
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You say that, but last year my InDesign program would not work for some reason. It'd open but then crash and close. I had a job on, and managed to produced a brochure in Illustrator by saving each page singularly then re-creating a merged PDF at the end. Generally speaking though, what Dave said is correct.
 
I recently finished designing a 92 page catalogue in illustrator. Full colour photography etc. It works just fine.
 
Yeah I was just going to say you can design x-amount of pages in Illustrator perfectly fine and have many artboards if you wish. I prefer using Illustrator for as much design work as I can but Indesign is made for multiple page layouts. I just have a freedom with Illustrator while in Indesign I feel a bit shackled in comparison. Funny as Quark & Indesign were the first programs I learnt to use but once I was introduced to AI that pretty much took over with everything I do. Because of this I am a bit out of practice with Indesign but it is definitely set-up better than AI for multiple page layouts and ease of use/assess to them.
 
CLHB said:
Yeah I was just going to say you can design x-amount of pages in Illustrator perfectly fine and have many artboards if you wish. I prefer using Illustrator for as much design work as I can but Indesign is made for multiple page layouts. I just have a freedom with Illustrator while in Indesign I feel a bit shackled in comparison. Funny as Quark & Indesign were the first programs I learnt to use but once I was introduced to AI that pretty much took over with everything I do. Because of this I am a bit out of practice with Indesign but it is definitely set-up better than AI for multiple page layouts and ease of use/assess to them.
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thanks guys,
 
Also like Indesign's ability to set up template aspects and styles. So if you want to update one area, it will through out the document, saving you time.
 
Well said Gail - using templates and styles - automatic page numbering etc means that Indesign makes easy work of multiple changes, and of course can handle text flow... Programmes (generally) do what they 'say on the tin'.
 
As others have said - InDesign is a page layout tool.

You can of course create a 92 page booklet with Illustrator.

But it's a pain if you need to paginate the whole thing if a page moves, or you have text threaded over 30 pages - and other things.

InDesign is a fantastic tool for creating multi-page documents that will be printed by professional printers, or for creating ePubs, very small swf files, and documents intended for the web.

It can be used to make 1 or 2 page leaflets, booklets, or many pages, posters and other things.

It's rich in Paragraph and Character styles that can be lined integrally with Grep styles, Nested Styles and other things which can all be connected with Object Styles!



The ability to add Running Heads, Text Varialbes, Page Numbers, Facing Pages, Spiro Bound books and other things with easier is far more efficient than Illustrator.

It has vast typographical controls and loads of things that Illustrator simply cannot do.


It's certainly a very complex program and takes time to learn - but once you get it - it's great.


Think about this -

I formatted a 3,200 page book using Running Head Styles that changed per page - automatically!

And not just 1 running head - each page had at most 2 running heads that needed to change dynamically

I also applied bold, italics, bold italics, to certain words throughout - all with the flick of a switch.

What used to take me 6 months to do with Quark took me 2 weeks with InDesign.
 
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