Adobe InDesign

Adobe InDesign handles page layout and typesetting for print publications: magazines, catalogues, brochures and annual reports, sold by subscription.

Adobe InDesign is the application a designer opens to build a publication page by page, setting type and placing photographs and artwork inside a fixed page size for print. The maker is Adobe, which sells InDesign by itself and also inside Creative Cloud. The work it takes on is production rather than drawing: the words and the pictures arrive from somewhere else, and somebody still has to turn them into finished pages. Layout artists, production staff and designers reach for it on the jobs where the document itself, and not any one image in it, is the deliverable. Fonts come from Adobe Fonts, which the application reaches into directly. The Preflight panel inspects a document while it is being worked on and reports missing files, missing fonts and images at too low a resolution, so trouble surfaces before the file leaves the desk instead of afterwards. Data Merge takes a CSV or text file and pushes each record through one layout, turning a single design into a run of personalized pieces. The same subscription carries Adobe Express Premium and a monthly allowance of generative credits. Studios and agencies with print output are the core users, alongside magazine and catalogue producers, in-house marketing and communications teams, and the artwork departments that prepare files for a press. An education rate applies to students and teachers. Larger buyers take licenses centrally, with shared storage attached, rather than paying one person at a time. Whichever route, the subscription runs on an annual plan billed monthly, taken for InDesign alone or for Creative Cloud Pro. Each tier carries its own storage and credit allowance. In a working studio the layout is rarely the first step or the last. Photographs come out of Photoshop, logotypes and illustrations out of Illustrator, and Adobe names InCopy as the companion application for writers and editors beside it. Finished documents move on to Acrobat Pro for review and distribution, or to Adobe Express when somebody outside the design team has to adapt a piece. What comes out of it is the ordinary printed matter of a company: magazines and catalogues, annual reports, brochures, posters, price lists and mailers built from a customer list. When the deliverable is a multi-page printed document, this is the Adobe application the job lands in.