InDesign is Adobe’s new page layout program. While I’m not clear on the whole history, one of the first page layout programs was Aldus PageMaker, released in 1985. Adobe merged with Aldus in 1994, and acquired PageMaker. Quark released its first version of XPress in 1988, and quickly became the industry favorite. PageMaker was popular with many “desktop publishers,” and XPress  was used by the pros. PageMaker is still around, barely.

Adobe decided to build a new page layout program that could compete with the features XPress had incorporated, and which most professional designers demand.

InDesign was released in 1999, but wasn’t widely accepted until Quark dropped the ball by taking three years to make XPress Mac OS X compliant. At this point, it’s hard to tell which program is the industry favorite since Quark is a privately held company and doesn’t release any sales figures. However, there are many publications, design studios, and ad agencies that switched to InDesign instead of waiting for Quark to get it together.

The down-side to switching to InDesign is that it feels a bit more cumbersome to use than XPress, especially if you’ve been using XPress for many years.

The up-side is that it has the same features as XPress, and then some. And because it’s made by Adobe, the integration of images from Illustrator and Photoshop is a lot easier. It also boasts the same designing-for-the-web options that XPress recently introduced. You’ll find a lot of the same tools in the InDesign toolbox that are in Illustrator’s, and of course, a lot of the same keystroke shortcuts.

 

WORK SPACE

The pasteboard that extends to the right and left of each page; a toolbox, and several palettes to make working easier. You can create master pages that contain elements that will appear on each page in a document, and add pages to a document by dragging them into the “pages” palette. You can create paragraph and character styles to use over and over again, and there are nice (familiar) tools to draw with.

There’s also a control palette similar to the “measurement” palette in Quark XPress, where various options can be selected, depending on the tool or object selected.

I’m hoping the more I use it, the more I’ll like it.