What Is InDesign, and How Can It Help You?

This application underpins most of the magazines, books, newspapers, and printed ads you see every day.

InDesign is one of Adobe's most versatile and advanced design programs, although it is not as well known as some of the other Adobe applications such as Photoshop, Illustrator, or Premiere.

It's a desktop publishing and typesetting app, aimed at designers and creatives who work with products that generally end up in printed form.

It is often used to create magazines, books, or newspapers, but also promotional materials such as posters, flyers, and all kinds of signage and advertising.

InDesign is incredibly versatile. Some designers also use it to design e-books or business cards, for example. The possibilities, as is often the case with creative software, are endless.

These possibilities now extend beyond printed media, too. InDesign can be used to create 100% digital documents, like interactive PDFs or even webpages.

A little bit of history

If you have never heard of InDesign before, you might be surprised to learn that it is one of Adobe's oldest products. It was first launched in 1999, and during the last 20 years it has become one of the most popular publishing tools used by editorial and graphic designers around the world.

From the outset, InDesign stood out for its advanced tools and modular approach in the world of desktop publishing, offering transparencies, shadows, and other elements that were not common in editing programs of the time.

But its popularity grew significantly around 2007 when Adobe included it in its Creative Suite, the company's collection of creative programs for designers who needed multiple applications. By integrating inDesign more closely with Photoshop and Illustrator, the workflow between these three programs was made much more straightforward.

The perfect sidekick

Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign are indeed frequently used together. One way to understand the relationship between them is to think of Illustrator and Photoshop as specialized programs focused on manipulating individual design elements, such as photos or vector illustrations. InDesign would be the application in which all those elements are integrated, organized and processed.

Where InDesign really shines is when it comes to mixing images and text: ads, banners, posters, books, magazines, catalogs ... all these projects can be created from scratch within the application, and with adjustments and tools that are usually not available or optimized in the other two apps.

How to install it

If you have full access to Adobe's Creative Cloud, the easiest way to install it is to go to Adobe's website for the app. If you are registered as a Creative Cloud user, the page will directly offer you the option to download it and install it on your PC or Mac.

If your Creative Cloud access level does not include all the tools–for example, if you pay only for Photoshop or Illustrator–you will have to add the application subscription to your services.

As with other programs, Adobe offers the ability to install a trial version and use it for a limited time. It is the best way to test out the different tools it offers and see if it fits your workflow, or the needs of the project at hand. before making the leap.

If you want to learn everything there is to know about InDesign, and its capabilities, graphic designer Jamie Sanchez Hearn teaches you how to make the most of it in the Domestika course Adobe InDesign for Beginners.

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