Illustrator vs. InDesign
This article appeared in Issue 147 of InDesign Magazine.At the dawn of desktop publishing, in days of myth and mullets, two ’80s titans dueled it out to determine who would rule the world of design and layout. It was QuarkXPress versus Aldus PageMaker in a battle for the ages (and pages). QuarkXPress eventually came out on top and reigned supreme for many years. But, around the turn of the millennium a new challenger arose from the ashes of PageMaker—yes, it was InDesign. This young upstart crackled with energy, intelligence, and a burning desire to dominate the desktop. Once InDesign got up to speed there was no stopping it, and for many designers the days of QuarkXPress faded from memory like an unused keyboard shortcut.
But even with its primordial foe vanquished, InDesign could never rest easy. For another rival, an elder sibling in the Adobe family, was always threatening to steal away the hearts and minds of designers. To this day, Illustrator remains InDesign’s greatest rival, because despite their obvious differences, there is a great amount of overlap in the two programs. So it can be hard for many users to choose one or the other for a particular project.
In this article, we’ll have a spirited head-to-head debate on the relative strengths and weaknesses of Illustrator and InDesign to help you choose the winner for any project you’re undertaking. Ari will take the side of Illustrator, and Mike will advocate for InDesign. So, without further ado, let’s get ready to rumble!
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Features of both nicely compared. It was a great refresher.
For advertising and print, I use Illustrator or Photoshop for creating vector or bitmapped elements that are placed into Indesign. Indesign is a big, easy-to-manage vessel for assembling content.
Even on those rare occasions when I do something as mundane as a fleet of customer business cards, I use Indesign. The presentations to sell logo and brand concepts — or business cards — are created in Illustrator and the pitch is assembled in Indesign. For me it’s just easy and predictable.
Indesign style sheets for paragraphs and characters are easy to manage. Page masters with fancy headers and footers [with sections and numbers, no less) aren’t complicated.
Turning a INDD file into a PDF for proofing and repro these days is pain free. Client revisions are a breeze. Changes within Indesign to placed Illustrator or Photoshop files are as easy as ‘Edit Original’.
CC Libraries make organizing graphics and color between Illustrator and Indesign very simple.
Like Ari, I’ve been using Illustrator for eons. And flipping from Quark to Indesign was a no brainer. Together, all these Adobe products play nice together. But frankly — for me — it was the PDF that made the biggest difference.
Illustrator and Indesign each have their own unique qualities, but I’m inclined to make my own work life as easy as possible. I’ll let Indesign be used for Indesign things, and Illustrator for Illustrator things.
Well said, Stephen! Glad you liked the article.
You have a very sensible workflow Stephen! I also appreciate that we now have Share for Review in InDesign. Like you and Mike, I started out with QuarkXpress.
And I switched from Coreldraw to Illustrator [yikes!].
I haven’t looked at the Share for Review in Indesign. How is this different from sharing a PDF?
Steve
http://www.efsmart.com | http://www.spaceola.com
I too have been been an illustrator user since discovering 88 at art school, apart from a brief sojourn with FreeHand at one company until I persuaded them to switch! Until I started working on my own again I was always the go to person for ‘How do I do this?’
Been an InDesign Magazine subscriber since issue 1 too!
The Illustrator/Photoshop/InDesign workflow is almost seamless now, makes designers much more productive.