Keep reading to discover the differences between InDesign and Illustrator.
What Is Adobe InDesign?
InDesign is a professional tool that helps you create high-quality page and layout designs for digital or print media. It also gives you access to Adobe Stock for typefaces from world-leading foundries and all kinds of images.
Adobe InDesign also makes your content management tasks easier with Adobe Experience Manager. Therefore, the tool offers you everything you need to produce and publish a wide range of print or digital media like books, eBooks, digital magazines, and product brochures.
What Is Adobe Illustrator?
Designers who create designs for mobile, interactive video, print, and web consider Adobe Illustrator a gold standard for the industry. It’s essentially a vector graphics drawing and editing software of the Adobe Creative Suite. With your creativity, you can make high-quality illustrations of real-life events so that you can get rid of using stock images on your web pages or mobile apps.
Illustrator is quickly becoming more popular among content creators and freelance designers who want to take care of their own design work. Thanks to its numerous drawing functions, you can create a variety of artworks for digital or print media projects.
Designing Tools and Features
InDesign comes with multiple features, such as an elaborate toolbox. Some of the tools of this app allow you to select, edit, and create page components. Another set of tools let you select type, lines, shapes, and gradients.
The Adobe Capture extension feature of InDesign empowers you to extract design elements like color palettes, shapes, and typefaces from an inspiring image. You can use these extracted resources to create authentic content using your own imagination.
Other than design features, this tool also comes with robust page layout editing and printing options.
On the other hand, Illustrator offers more drawing features than InDesign. Tools like Selection, Pen, Curvature, and Layer let you create unique designs quickly with drag-and-drop editing. The Recolor Artwork solution is an AI-based color tool that quickly swaps design colors without manual editing.
Automations and Integrations
You can easily integrate InDesign with other third-party apps to export and import content or layouts. For example, Brightspot and InDesign integration facilitates effortless digital-to-print workflow for newspapers, magazines, and books. InDesign can also integrate with third-party content management systems like Canto DAM.
Similar to InDesign, Illustrator can also connect with third-party apps like content management systems with limited options. However, it has robust integration with other Adobe Creative Suite tools like Photoshop and Adobe PDF.
Illustrator supports various file formats so that you can reuse designs and artworks from other tools. The tool can import Photoshop artwork, Adobe PDF, AutoCAD, EPS, and DCS files effortlessly.
For design workflow automation in Illustrator, you can use features like actions and scripts.
Usability and Learning Curve
Adobe Creative Suite tools are for professional-level work. Therefore, you need to go through some learning before becoming an expert. However, the latest InDesign and Illustrator apps are easy-to-navigate than the previous versions.
Both InDesign and Illustrator offer a wide range of ready-to-use templates for free; you’ll find templates for several popular design projects. Moreover, Illustrator provides an interactive learning tool that helps you create basic designs like Pac-Man, Flower, Mobile Device, and so on.
Collaborative Work
InDesign has flexible and intuitive features for collaborative design projects. You don’t need to navigate away from your app to review design work or feedback. The Share for Review option enables you to initiate a collaborative discussion with the client and manage feedback from one place.
On InDesign, you can modify the document access to either Invite Only or Public Link to fit your project requirements.
Illustrator also supports collaborative work through the Illustrator cloud document feature. Apart from sharing, it goes a step ahead and gives you access to your work across many devices. Therefore, if you need to travel, resume your work on iPad, which you left unfinished on your desktop.
Online or Offline Publication Work
InDesign is a powerful tool for the publication of print or digital media. You can resize your document without leaving the actual file by using the tools from the Properties tab. You can edit the orientation, width, and height in real-time.
It also lets you reorganize the pages with a few clicks and even add a new page in the middle of the book without manual work. Additionally, using the Master Pages feature, you can create uniform columns, footers, headers, and margin guides for all the pages.
On the contrary, Illustrator is only suitable for one-page content publication tasks. You can use the ruler and grid tools for content alignment. The Character and Type tools help you to edit the typefaces and text styles.
When to Use InDesign
The thumb rule is you need to use InDesign when your design project includes a lot of text per page, page numbers, and uniform page layout or designs. Hence, when you need to create designs for posters, flyers, postcards, eBooks, brochures, resumes, presentations, or menus, InDesign is the best choice.
This tool is also helpful when you need to create multiple documents from one master template. For example, InDesign’s Data Merge feature lets you automate the business card production work. If you need to create cards for multiple clients, you can reuse a template instead of starting from scratch.
When to Use Illustrator
On the contrary, Illustrator is more of a drawing tool. It has various drawing features that enable you to utilize your imagination in creating artwork. As per Adobe, this tool is suitable to create content like typefaces, logos, icons, cursive font-based designs, charts, banners, infographics, and wallpapers.
Illustrator is also appropriate to create designs for app/website user interfaces, wireframes, or landing pages. The tool enables you to scale up or down content easily. You can also move around the content on the canvas through drag-and-drop actions.
Adobe InDesign vs. Illustrator: Be an All-Rounder
InDesign and Illusrator have a different set of features that, in combination deliver excellent results. You need a set of tools, rather than rather than reyling on one, to deliver the best work in a graphic design project.
If your goal is to become an expert graphic designer, it’s high time that you get hands-on training on the entire Adobe suite of graphics design tools, including InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator.
