In truth I used to be able to say that InDesign while being a program that I was intimately familiar with, was one of the programs I used less in Creative Suite. Recently that has changed for the better, and I have to say part of it has to do with Adobe CS5. Now most of you know me for my skills with retouching and photo-manipulation, and that I have skills with web design and flash. Just because I haven’t been using my layout design skills in print nearly as much as my other skills doesn’t mean they aren’t there! In truth layout design and therefore InDesign isn’t as glamorous and therefore doesn’t get a lot of attention. Any of you who work in the industry that have ever had to do a billboard, a bus shelter, or anything for newspaper know that InDesign is the designers weapon of choice, and plays a much larger role in the industry behind the scenes than most people realize.

So in this review I’m not just going tell you about the new features and do a cut and paste job from Adobe’s website, I’m going to walk you through why these features are useful and how they help with general task that would be more frustrating otherwise, I’m also going to cover some of the old features and a few ways you can do things you may have overlooked in the past when using InDesign.

Simple Selection (Finally Made Simple).

I can’t begin to explain to those of you who have never had to put together a layout with multiple image with InDesign how frustrating it used to be when you wanted to resize your images once you’ve put them into frames, and to be sure you selected the image itself an not the frame. This used to be nowhere near intuitive as it needed to be. Thankfully that is no longer the case! Now they give you circle icon that makes a clear distinction between when you are editing the object rather than the frame it resides in, and they also give you distinctively different color guides.

Multiple Pages and the Page Tool
(What God Always Intended!)

One of things that used to annoy me was that if I was working on a campaign that I would have to have multiple files to deal with different layouts and sizes that all essentially were going to use the same elements and colors and type faces. What really got me was that it made it difficult to really appreciate the impact of all the pieces and how they work and look together. I’d find myself having print things out or wait of my sample proofs before I could do this, which was such a waste of time. Now if I want to produce a poster, flyer, business card, letterhead, and envelope I can have all the different page sizes I need in one document and send them out to a client as a single PDF presentation. All thanks to the nifty little page tool. Now I not only can have multiple pages in my documents but can control the individual sizes, margins etc.  It makes it so much easier to verify that all the colors are consistent, that everything has the right fonts, settings, and it just saves time having to only manage one file and one set of assets. This is what a page layout program was always meant to be. Most of us who use InDesign are working with high priority print projects, anything from story boards, movie posters, marketing collateral, or outdoor media, consistency is a big deal,  time is always in short supply, and organization is a must. This one seemingly simple feature makes all the difference.

It also means we can make creative task that used to require a trick and little bit a faith, much more intuitively. Ever dream of designing a pullout poster for a magazine, but gave up because of the shear frustration involved in figuring that sort of thing out? Now its incredibly simple. Every wanted to do an inside flap or spine for a mock-up book cover or magazine cover? Again, now its so much simpler than it was to get it to be the right dimensions. You finally can design the way you always meant.

Closing the Gap

The Gap tool is something that is going to be underestimated by people left and right. If you’ve ever wanted to do something like adjust a grid of images or work with a complicated image grid in a newspaper layout, this tool is your savior. You can now do this quickly and intuitively and see the live results.

Spanning and Splitting Columns (Not Splitting Hairs!)

In earlier older versions of InDesign, if you wanted a heading to span multiple columns you had agonize over the need to create a separate text frame for the heading. This of course would cause trouble with consistent leading with your headings throughout the document. Now you can span a heading across multiple columns to create a straddle head. You can also split a paragraph into multiple columns—especially useful for a list within an article. Any of you who have to do magazine or newspaper layouts can now breath a little easier and can get really creative and flexible while being precise. I find this new feature to be really refreshing because it specifically caters to people working withing the newspaper and magazine medium, and shows that Adobe has really begun to think about HOW people actually use the software, the same goes for the Page Tool feature.

Layers Panel
(Onions Aren’t the Only Thing That Come in Layers!)

Adobe finally allowed this member of the trinity (Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign) to come to the party! The layers panel finally works in a similar fashion to the way it does in Photoshop and Illustrator. Not a HUGE deal mind you, but I like having the ability to approach design the same way with the same options and not feeling like I lost too much when working between different programs. I think that really is part of the reason why some designers get stuck on working in one program vs. another, that feeling of dealing with something unfamiliar or being stripped of too many of the tools or options they’ve come to rely on. I know that sometime I can’t stand the subtle changes in how I have to behave or approach things just because this one program has too many time saving features to ignore, while forcing me into a new interface and taking away things that I’ve become attached to. CS5 as a whole just feels more together, more cohesive that previous Creative Suite releases.

Conclusions

Now many of you may be wondering why I haven’t commented on the great interactive features and animation portion of InDesign CS5. Honestly I haven’t had the chance to use them for anything practical yet, which will be the case with most people using InDesign, I’m sure they will come up with reasons to use it or work it into a project. One of the more practical ways I could see it being used is in a Story Board or a mock up for a Live One Sheet or Digital Billboard. I honestly think a client would be blown away and shocked by an animated Story Board and you could even set the voice overs to have actual audio. but this may be someone over the top or “gimmicky”. If there is a feature I haven’t used that I would really like to I would have to say that it is the E-book capabilities that InDesign offers in CS5. Overall I think that the new version of InDesign is a game changer in the fact that it will make much of the work that layout and production artist do for pre-press a world easier and simpler and really allow them to push the envelope on top of saving time.

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Roberto Blake

Roberto Blake is a Professional Graphics Designer and Photographer, living in Fayetteville NC, has work been working with Photoshop® for over 8 years now, and Flash® for the past 5 years.

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