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. 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?

Export indesign to illustrator