TrustRadius Insights for Adobe InDesign are summaries of user sentiment data from TrustRadius reviews and, when necessary, third party data sources.
Pros
Layering Feature: Users have appreciated the layering feature in Adobe InDesign for its ease of use in toggling specific elements on and off with a simple click, allowing for quick visual comparisons.
Master Pages Utilization: Users value the ability to utilize Master Pages in Adobe InDesign, finding it beneficial for extending styling options across different pages and effortlessly applying multiple styles like page numbers and company information selectively.
Cloud Libraries Collaboration: The Cloud Libraries feature in Adobe InDesign is praised by users for facilitating team collaboration efficiently, enabling access to shared elements such as images, fonts, and brand colors without requiring an online browser.
Adobe InDesign has been used for years as a go-to page design tool in our newsrooms. Following system changes, it has been successfully integrated with various content management systems and utilized for both newspaper and magazine design work. It is now primarily used for more complex magazine design work, since it has greater flexibility than the page design software embedded in our content management system.
Pros
InDesign is excellent at creating impactful page designs.
It gives great flexibility over the handling of images, including cut-outs.
It's excellent for headline and text editing on the page.
Cons
InDesign integrations with third-party systems can operate more quickly, but depending on the integration, saving and loading may be a bit slower.
The handling of cutouts imported into InDesign is good, but creating cutouts within InDesign could be quicker and easier.
Adding and removing pages from multi-page documents could be smoother.
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe InDesign is very well-suited to creating professional-looking page designs. If you want a newspaper or magazine to have attractive pages that go beyond simple templates, InDesign is the best option out there, to my knowledge. It's less suited to scenarios where people without page design skills are responsible for creating pages, as it requires some training and skills to use effectively.
I use InDesign for a variety of publication designs for clients. As a graphic designer I'm asked for things like business cards, flyers, brochures, documents, letterheads and even books. InDesign makes designing and editing these documents very easy. With features like character and paragraph styles I can make quick edits to entire documents that affect every part without having to make dozens of small edits.
Pros
Design
Publication
Automation
Cons
Price
Integration with other apps
Text frame options
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe InDesign would be well suited to all things publication. If you're a designer that designs anything for print then a software like this is a must have and InDesign is one of the best, especially if you use other Adobe products and they work seamlessly together. It's not so good for raster based design work but the assumption would be that if you have InDesign you also have photoshop and can use them both in tandem.
VU
Verified User
Professional in Marketing (Hospitality company, 51-200 employees)
We use Adobe InDesign for a number of design jobs, including brochures, booklets, programmes, catalogues etc, for internal and external use.
Pros
Able to design down to minute details
Cross platform use with other Adobe products is great
Adobe support centre and online communities are great for if/when you get stuck
Cons
I have found a few bugs in recent years
Broken image links are the bane of my life when working on other people's files
Likelihood to Recommend
We always use Adobe InDesign for creating brochures, as you can control very specific details of your design which other platforms can't. It has some really useful tools to help save time with duplication, numbering, master pages etc.
VU
Verified User
Manager in Marketing (Design company, 501-1000 employees)
We use this program everyday in all of our creative branding projects. It helps us produce high quality work to express the brands we work with.
Pros
Easy interface for working on design.
Meshes seamlessly with other Adobe products
Constantly updating with improvements
Cons
Sometimes font issues are a little wonky - not sure why.
Could they make it so you could do image editing within the program?
Likelihood to Recommend
I use it daily for all work I do at my agency. It is a reliable program that is very user-friendly. Logo work is probably better done in Illustrator & image editing better in Photoshop.
We use InDesign on the daily when working on catalogs, decks, sale sheets. It's a great tool when you have to lay out multiple pages including spreads when submitting artwork over to our printer. Easy to work with and love the overall layout when you have to manage pages, assets, and a plus when adding hyperlinks to objects.
Pros
Layout
Spread
Fast
Easy to setup
Cons
There are times when fonts and linked images go missing or need to be relinked even if root files were not moved.
There can be glitches at times.
Speed over quality. Would love the software to work faster with multiple files open.
Likelihood to Recommend
When working on booklets, multiple-page files, I highly recommend using InDesign. Illustrator is capable but there are limitations that InDesign makes it much easier to use. Especially when having to layout and export in a spreadsheet style. Overall file handling is very easy with InDesign when handing files over. The interface is clean and you can even block off all objects off the canvas so it doesn't clutter the overall space
I'm a graphic designer of our design department. We are currently using [Adobe] InDesign for creating catalog, brochures, and sellsheets of our company's products. Every year our company will make new product catalog and new sellsheets, we are following the same template, which [Adobe] InDesign helps a lot with, so we just apply the master page and fill it in with new content, it makes our catalog style consist and also makes our lives easier.
Pros
master pages helps apply the same layout
character style
paragraph style
Cons
the linked text frame sometimes bugs me
maybe [Adobe] InDesign can automatically read a folder called "links" as AI does
besides, all good
Likelihood to Recommend
I really love the way [Adobe] InDesign allows us the apply and change the template briefly. When we are doing catalogs, it saves us a lot of time to play with the layout. Also, the character style and paragraph style help a lot, instead of changing the font type and size all the time, we just need to click on the style name.
VU
Verified User
Employee in Marketing (International Trade & Development company, 51-200 employees)
Adobe InDesign is currently being used in our company to create and/or receive design files for our clients' direct mail needs, this mostly includes forms and envelopes. We also use it to create the copy decks for the direct mail we send out. The software is only used by our Marketing and Lettershop departments. The reason we choose Adobe InDesign over other products is because of it's complexity and because of its standardization in the industry. As far as complexity goes, we have found that other products just don't seem to compare when it comes to the amount of things the tool itself can do. We use it for aspects such as mail merge, layering, shared libraries, master pages, and much more. When it comes to standardization in the industry, you really aren't going to find a more standard product used for design than an Adobe product. It makes it much easier to work in a agency setting, like we do, when you use the same products as your clients.
Pros
Layering - When comparing to products like Microsoft Word, the layering becomes a big plus for Adobe InDesign. Layering allows you to turn "on" and "off" certain aspects of your document, such as if you wanted to show what a direct mail piece looks like with just the art work showing and then again with sample data showing by just the click of a button.
Master Pages - Again, when comparing to Microsoft Word, master pages in Adobe InDesign takes "styling" just a little bit further. It makes it much easier to create certain multiple styles that you can easily apply (or not apply) to various pages. Such as if you wanted the page number and company to show on certain pages, and not on others.
Cloud Libraries - This is a GREAT feature for companies who have multiple employees working in the software. When one employee adds an element to a Cloud Library, every other employee has access to it as well. This doesn't just pertain to images, like you would think - you can add things like styles, whole paragraphs (such as boiler plates), fonts, brand colors, and more. The great part is, you also don't have to be working in an online browser in order to access them.
Cons
Crashes - It is almost understandable because of how large the software is, but we have had issues with the product crashing randomly, more so than others software we use.
Incompatible Versions - Recently we have had some issues with opening files from other organizations and getting a message stating that their document was made with a "newer version" than ours and that it's incompatible - even though we don't have any pending updates to our software. It can be confusing because now that the Creative Cloud version exists, it seems like there should no longer be error issues for "newer" versions (such as InDesign 5.1, or InDesign 6.1, like there used to be - now it's just InDesign CC going forward with no newer versions.) So this error message, in theory, shouldn't be happening.
Complicated - Again, it is understandable because of how complex of a tool this is, but this is not a tool you are going to be fully able to train a coworker on in a week. In fact most people who have used it for years still probably only use about 10-20% of the tools features. This type of software, unlike Microsoft Word, is usually only used by people who work in field of design/creative, so you wouldn't expect every employee to be able to use it.
Likelihood to Recommend
Adobe InDesign would be well suited for scenarios such as created very intricate documents, such as ones that are utilizing many different views or layers. It would also be well suited for creating very large documents such as creating manuals or books for print. A scenario where Adobe InDesign would be less appropriate would be for creating a logo or a graphic. It also might be less appropriate for something such as a simple company document like an offer letter, or a fax, not that it couldn't be used but it would be similar to using a scientific calculator to add 2+2, it's just too complex of a tool to be used for something as simple as that.
it is only being used by the communications department. It allows us to create and design various projects for a variety of departments in our organization. We produce everything from invitations, programs, collateral material, social media images, brochures, magazines, etc.
Pros
InDesign has so many excellent features, too many to name. A few that I find very helpful are the Character Styles. Creating styles within my documents saves me much time when formatting content.
Another feature I use frequently is the feature to export selections as JPEGs.
Cons
There are many times I try to copy images from Illustrator into InDesign and the image is too large so it makes it an EPS rather than an editable image. It would be nice if there weren't limitations on this.
It would also be nice if the Paste Into feature allowed you to do this to images at different times without erasing the previous Paste Into image.
Likelihood to Recommend
InDesign suits our organization and our needs perfectly. It is the main program the communications department uses on a daily basis. It helps us create the promotional materials we need for our various departments. The functionality of InDesign over the years has really us saved time and resources. We miss not having an actual install CD so will be forced to move to the cloud sooner than later.
Adobe InDesign is used across our Design Team and by e-mail designers/developers. All our print/marketing materials are created using InDesign. It helps a lot to have templates with all the brand styles applied and speeds up the process of creating new brochures, flyers, and email assets. As a person directly involved in designing webpages and email, I found it very easy to use InDesign to change templates, adjust image ratios, and standardize them. Also, exporting InDesign pages in a different format (we use PNGs for emails) is a breeze.
Pros
Great for creating master-templates for a variety of media.
Great text flow control.
Cons
Links do not auto update.
A learning curve may be steep for a novice.
Likelihood to Recommend
As far as my experience goes, InDesign is a great tool to create layouts for all the possible print media, from a visit card to a book. Our company deals with travel, and it is imperative to produce high quality, visually attractive promotion materials: postcards, flyers, and brochures that are consistent in style and follow brand guides. InDesign is a great tool for this. It does not allow us to do image manipulation or create vectors, so other Adobe products have to be used instead.
InDesign is used in our Art Department, consisting of 8 Pre Press / Graphic Design personnel. It's primarily used to set up text and images to be exported as high-resolution pdf files. InDesign is used in conjunction with Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator.
Pros
Magazine layout. InDesign is extremely stable; you can link text from page to page in any order. You can have a story start on page 3, continue on page 8, and continue again on page 27. If you make edits to the text, it will reflow throughout the magazine/book.
It's perfect for creating comic books with various sizes and shapes of picture boxes, word bubbles, and so on.
Cons
Problems can occur when adding drop shadows to text. Sometimes the shadow can produce an undesirable effect on graphic elements below. The solution is to use Adobe Illustrator for drop shadows.
InDesign has a number of special effects that can be better done using Adobe Illustrator and importing into InDesign. Though if you do not have Illustrator, there is a lot you can do in InDesign.
Likelihood to Recommend
I use InDesign to create comic books and instructional books with lots of graphics and diagrams (not at my present place of employment). If you are creating projects with large amounts of pages, InDesign is the tool to use. One of its main strengths is stability. If you have a file that is 500 pages with linked text and graphics, it will not bog down.
