Last month, Open for Business looked at one component of Adobe's Creative Suite 2 Premium: Adobe Acrobat 7 Professional. In that review, we found the product was certainly useful and worth its price tag, but it isn't exactly what one would call a “creative” product, in the typical sense. So, what puts the “creative” in Creative Suite? Today, we look at Adobe InDesign CS2, the package's professional grade desktop publishing program.
Let's start with the obvious: InDesign offers far more than an SMB user will likely need. This is a tool meant to go head-to-head with QuarkXpress, not Microsoft Publisher and AppleWorks. Nevertheless, we came at the review from the precise angle of the SMB market. If a small business needs Acrobat and Photoshop, it already makes sense to purchase Creative Suite bundle rather than the products ala carte. With that in mind, if InDesign would prove useful for the small business user, it might easily fill the $99 difference between purchasing the former two products separately and buying Creative Suite Premium.
If you are familiar with Photoshop, you will immediately appreciate the similar, sensible interface of InDesign. For those such as our OfB Labs reviewers who had not previously used Photoshop, this was not a big advantage initially, but as we used the various products of the suite, we came to appreciate the value of having the same interface across the board. Learning how to work with Photoshop made it easier to use InDesign too. That's not to say each does not have its own quirks, but as a whole, the products feel related to a greater extent than Microsoft PowerPoint does to Microsoft Word, for example.
The test documents were of the sort an SMB user might produce, such as an advertising poster and the conversion of a medium sized Word document (40 pages) into a book-like template. The surprising thing was that these tasks could be completed easier and faster in InDesign than in Publisher or other similar lower end tools that we had previously used. InDesign's ability to easily work with Photoshop files was a big plus, as were its advanced text tools, feathered drop shadows and other effects that made it possible to accomplish in the publishing program what otherwise would need to be taken care of in a graphics editor. Support for adjusting the transparency of objects is an especially large boon in our opinion. While often times low-end DTP programs feel more like half-hearted word processors with slightly better layout abilities than actual word processors, InDesign has the creative tools necessary to get common layout jobs done without feeling restrained by the tools.
In the case of the Word document, it was imported with very little fuss and muss. The only hang up occurred when we tried to import a document with a large amount of footnotes, rather than endnotes. By and large, documents were easily formatted, although Word formatting was maintained well enough that little was necessary in the form of adjustments that required the use of those formatting tools. Creating professional looking tables of contents, headers and other related items were a snap and mostly were self-explanatory. Customization is much greater, obviously, in this tool over SMB-oriented options, and we found it necessary to refer to the online help to take advantage of some of this potential, but we were able to produce a finished document without any online help based solely on past experience with other SMB-targeted DTP programs. Reasonable defaults were of great help in this respect.
Once the projects were done, we took advantage of the sister program Acrobat to transform the works into PDF files for easy transport to a printer. Acrobat really shines when working in this area, since we were able to specify quality settings on the PDF to insure that the very nice results of InDesign were not degraded during the conversion process. (Acrobat has different settings depending on if you plan to print or electronically distribute a document.)
The key question that we began with was simple: does InDesign provide a “value add” to the Creative Suite worth a small business's attention? After spending several months using it to create various layouts, it seems clear to us that it does. However, our initial question had the assumption that InDesign was overpowered for users outside of the design industry and hence we implicitly suggested that InDesign might not be the right choice for purchase outside of receiving it in a bundle. There are two reasons one might think this, first, the cost and, second, the additional features add additional complexity.
Having used the program, we would no longer hold that to be the case: the increased productivity of having a design program that includes graphics application-quality settings for the layout allowed us to minimize the time it took to create documents that were much nicer looking than those we could produce with Publisher or other similar programs. While the interface has a lot of options, it is not overpowering at all; we believe the average user with some kind of graphic editing experiencee will be quite comfortable using the interface.
Initially, the price tag of InDesign may seem a bit high for menial publishing tasks, but the extra power pays off in lower TCO. This becomes even clearer via a key benefit of using the same tool as professional publishers, should the day come that one's small business project becomes big business. The platform dependence and non-standard nature of the native formats used by Publisher, Pages and AppleWorks can become a serious impediment in document collaboration and publishing, requiring the recreation of hundreds or thousands of hours of work in a program such as InDesign down the road. By starting out with a professional grade tool, documents saved in the native format seem much more future safe.
If a company is considering whether the CS suite is a good value, InDesign is another pointer that inclines us to say “yes.” If a company is considering whether InDesign by itself is the right choice, “yes” seems the likely answer there as well.
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Executive Summary: InDesign CS 2 Adobe InDesign CS 2 provides design industry power in an interface familiar to Photoshop users. With a sensible layout and very good online help, the average user with minor experience in lesser DTP programs will find it easy to create professional looking publications very rapidly. ($699 individually or $1,199 as part of Creative Suite 2 Premium, www.adobe.com.) | The Grade |
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