Expert: Pat Bensky - 11/15/2011

Question
QUESTION: Good day
Could you tell me what does Indesign do that Illustrator cannot do?
Why does one need Indesign when one has Illustrator and why should one worry to use Indesign. Particularly with reference to the desigining of advertisements and writing copy.
Regards,
Sunil Mahabir
Pembroke Pines, Florida

ANSWER: Hi,
Illustrator is an artwork design program; InDesign is a page layout program. You create images with Illustrator and you create publications with InDesign. InDesign is for creating whole publications such as brochures, catalogues, directories, and so on.

Pat

---------- FOLLOW-UP ----------

QUESTION: Thanks for the answer.
What if i use illustrator instead of indesign for brochures, catalogs, directories etc. What will be the difference in presentation if i use illustrator instead of indesign for this purpose.
Why would one want to use indesign instead of illustrator to do the brochures etc. What is the difference?

Regards,
sunil

Answer
Hi,

Illustrator is for creating pictures.
InDesign is for creating pages that may contain multiple pictures, text, and other elements. Whilst you can probably create a brochure with Illustrator, if you want to create something that has multiple pages, or lots of text, this would be difficult to do with Illustrator. You can use text with Illustrator but you don't have very much control over its layout and formatting, as you do with InDesign. For example, if you want text to appear in columns (like in a newspaper) and to create sophisticated stylesheets that will automatically control things like hyphens, paragraph breaks, etc., you can't do things like that with Illustrator.

For some examples of the kind of publications you can create with InDesign, see:
http://www.catbase.com/products/catbase/examples/index.html

I don't think you could do those with Illustrator!

HTH

Pat