Adobe Indesign and Illustrator

[TTT]

Hi Everyone.

Have you used Adobe Indesign and Illustrator? Does Indesign include Adobe Illustrator capabilities? Could you do the same work in Indesign as you could in Illustrator?

I would appreciate any input.

Thanks.

TTT

[mwc]

While Indesign does have some crossover tools that can do some light illustration....it is primarily a page layout application, for setting text and arranging/placing photo's and art.
Illustrator is a MUCH MORE powerful tool for creating artwork, and you would be advised to use it if you are creating a lot, or making complex files.

Indesign,Pagemaker,Quark live on the same block...
Illustrator and Freehand are the crazy friends who come and visit..
All Microsoft products are the wild street dogs...stinkin', sick, mutts....
Oh yeah, Photoshop owns the town.

[pmkprog]

For most single page projects, it's a toss up as to which would be better.
Multi-page, use both.

[The_Stevinator]

Originally Posted by pmkprog

For most single page projects, it's a toss up as to which would be better.
Multi-page, use both.

i disagree, mwc is right. illustrator is a much more powerfull application. i would suggest learning the program more prong. you'll be shocked what it can do.

[pmkprog]

I forgot to add the word "basic".
I realize the full potential and ability of Illustrator.
I've seen books designed in reader spreads in Illustrator.
I also know how much of a pain in the but a complex Illustrator file can be, especially when dealing with large packaging design files.

[SlaveToTheMan]

Would you really prefer to get a job that's more than 2 pages done entirely in Illustrator? Even with crops and marks setup properly, I despise designers who can't be bothered to place their own page layouts in a proper app like InDesign, or even Quack.

Use the right tool for the job, period.

[bethwh]

Right on Slave!


Please use Photoshop and Illy to create your images and art.

Use Indd, Qxd for your page layouts and text!

[prepress_brillance_43]

Originally Posted by SlaveToTheMan

Would you really prefer to get a job that's more than 2 pages done entirely in Illustrator? Even with crops and marks setup properly, I despise designers who can't be bothered to place their own page layouts in a proper app like InDesign, or even Quack.

Use the right tool for the job, period.

Ditto that!! well put Slave!

[Leaf]

Adobe would want you to have the whole Creative Suite application. In their idealised world they see InDesign as a layout and type application, with Illustrator and Photoshop contributing objects as necessary. As Photoshop and Illustrator files are placeable and linkable natively, the workflow is fairly smooth, i.e. control-click on a placed object gives you the ability to launch that object in the relevant application, edit it, save and close and go back to InDesign where the image is automatically updated.
Other benefits of InDesign is the printing/export tools are more refined, and the pre-press aspects are more useable, i.e. separation preview is available. Also there is another little known benefit. You can place a DCS-2 file with spot colours in an InDesign document and output a composite PDF file with full resolution images that are properly seperable by a RIP. There is no other environment that I know of that will allow you to do this with a DCS-2 file out of the box, i.e. with no tricky plug-ins.
I worked in Packaging and no way would we have ever created a design in InDesign because each design was (usually) a single document, a one-off. Magazine, newspaper, etc. publishing is a different story, InDesign a much better tool there. I ditched Quark long ago, haven't used it since version 4.
Also I have to say that a graphics-rich InDesign document will have 10s or even 100s of linked objects. That can lead to confusion, the beauty of an Illustrator document is that everything bar images are native objects in their own right, making a much cleaner file. Even images can be easily embedded (although not good practice in my view). The type tools in Illustrator are almost as good as InDesign, just missing advanced composing tools so for the majority of single-document designs you would not gain much by using InDesign.

[beermonster]

quack sucks - end of.

illy and indy are very good. depending on your type of work, in general use indy for excellent page layout - either single documents or multi pages, photoshop rules of course, and illustrator, depending on your flavour of vector editing, is king of the hill for me. if i do any single page documents though i always use illy - just my choice really. sadly i've had to re-work our company stock list and i had to do this is quack <bows head in shame> or re-typeset the whole long...LONG list of stuff!

I was tempted to do it in indy but time constraints wouldnt allow it - sadly.

i'm in packaging here and would prefer to have ALL my work in illy - do impositions in illy and output from illy (we cant afford a workflow or imposition stuff like pandora) but i will settle for indy and a pdf ahead of quack - hell i'll even take a freehand file ahead of quack.

as we've all stated before - its using the right tools for the job