Using illustrator As An Alternative To InDesign

Your favorite application in the Adobe Creative Cloud Suite will most likely depend on what industry you’re working with. If you’re a photographer you’re probably most comfortable in Photoshop. If you’re a videographer you might live and breath by Premiere Pro and After Effects. If you’re a print and layout specialist you may only be familiar with InDesign. I’m sure you all understand where I’m going with this. It’s no secret that Adobe makes it easy to work seamlessly between their native applications, making it easy to use the best program for the task at hand. Using the appropriate application for each task is important, but what if you don’t know how to use the appropriate application? This is where alternative applications can be useful.

Illustrator is a great example of an alternative application to InDesign. Both applications are vector based with great transformation tools. Most graphic designers and artists are trained on using Photoshop and Illustrator before they even know that InDesign exists. For most people, Illustrator is a much less intimidating application to use due to its clearer and more graphical user interface. Where Illustrator has its biggest advantage over InDesign in the graphic design community is its common layout with Photoshop, the most popular tool for graphic designers and photographers. All the applications in the Creative Cloud Suite share similar esthetics, interfaces, and tool sets, so the transition between Photoshop and Illustrator seems to be the most natural of all the Adobe applications. Photoshop can also be an alternative to InDesign, but large sets of text can be difficult to manage, and the transformation options in Photoshop are better suited for working with pixel based images and special effects. Also, there isn’t an easy way to work on a document containing multiple pages.

In order to work with Illustrator as an alternative to InDesign, you should start by understand the primary differences between the two applications. In short, Illustrator is used to create vector artwork, and InDesign is used for content media layout. If you’re a little confused, or you’d like to refresh your memory about the differences between Illustrator and InDesign, you can read my article A Brief Overview of Photoshop, Illustrator, and Indesign here on the Freepik Blog to provide some insight on this topic. Once you have a general knowledge of what these applications are used for, Illustrator will make sense as a logical alternative to InDesign.

One of the primary uses for InDesign is working with typography. Working with large blocks of text can be very challenging in other Adobe applications, but it’s surprisingly simple in Illustrator. Type is vector based, which makes Illustrator a natural choice for text manipulation. There are options for creating new sets of text, importing text from an existing document, setting character and paragraph styles, defining text style guides, working with text wrapping and so much more. There are many things that Illustrator can do with typography that are not currently possible or would be very difficult to accomplish in InDesign. Creating outlines can be beneficial if you aren’t the only person working on a document because each person isn’t required to have a specific set of fonts installed on their computer in order to display the document correctly. InDesign can create outlines as well, but this task is left for the exporting process, and it makes the document unable to be edited in the native InDesign format. Creating outlines from text is also used as a design technique. Many designers use parts of a word, letter or symbol as a base for logos and other forms of digital art. This is just one of many examples of a feature available only in Illustrator.

Another popular use for InDesign is content layout. Illustrator uses the Place menu in the same way InDesign does. You can bring in a variety of media types including: photos, PDF documents, and text files. Illustrator also has powerful transform and manipulation tools. You have options for repositioning, scaling, reflecting, and duplicating objects. There are also options for how text is imported and how the user would like to display overset type in long form documents. Many of the keyboard shortcuts are identical in both applications. Illustrator includes advanced masking options, and layout options for object distribution and repeated object transformations. These options not only apply to objects created natively in Illustrator, but also those imported from other applications. In addition to importing different types of objects, Illustrator also offers the ability to embed objects native to Illustrator and those from other applications. There are a variety of layering options and blending mode options to allow users complete control of object placement and opacity. There is no shortage of layout options in Illustrator.

An important part of media layout is set up and exporting options. In InDesign, Pages are used to separate and organize spreads of content. In Illustrator, Artboards are used for this purpose. Both Pages and Artboards are used in similar ways. They both show content in the way it would be printed or viewed digitally in something like an ebook. There are also options to copy, arrange, and move content. In terms of exporting options, InDesign is much more advanced than Illustrator. Illustrator includes exporting options for vector based formats, pixel based formats and PDF and text based formats. In most cases, the options available in Illustrator will work for the most common needs.

Illustrator is certainly not equal to InDesign when it comes to content and media layout, but it can be a great alternative. If you need to finish a small project quickly, and you’re already familiar with Illustrator it is advantageous to work within Illustrator. As we’ve seen, Illustrator is more than capable of handling basic typography, layout, and exporting tasks. Some advanced users of InDesign often use Illustrator to complete their less tedious layout projects. If you don’t work with media and content layout often, it may not be worth your time to learn InDesign. However, if you’re working on larger projects such books, magazines, newsletters or application layouts, I would advise mastering InDesign.