The major message at this year's Adobe Max Conference was that in 2019, everyone can—and should—be more creative.
And why not? Powerful new features in the CC family can nurture anyone's creativity.
InDesign CC 2019, Adobe's acclaimed page composition program fits right in with this strategy, advancing the capability of design software, especially when it comes to the user experience.
Adobe is reimagining InDesign to accelerate workflows, liberate creativity, and encourage exploration—all while motivating us to embrace immersive new media.
Big changes in Adobe fonts, automatic layout adjustment, and a smart new Properties panel are just a few of the specific updates that make InDesign feel refreshed and attuned to the current design zeitgeist.
Pricing and Getting Started
InDesign is available only by subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, either as a single app, for $20.99 per month, or as part of the entire design suite, for $52.99 per month.
Adobe's CC suite includes every arrow in Adobe's professional design software quiver, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and more.
For comparison, Microsoft Publisher (Windows-only) comes with Office 365 subscriptions starting at $6.99 per month; QuarkXPress costs $849 (or $399 as a competitive upgrade); VivaDesigner starts at $139 for a permanent license with no subscription; and Xara Designer Pro X costs $299 as a one-shot or $5.95 per month as a subscription.
You can install InDesign on up to two computers simultaneously.
Mac and Windows versions interoperate, with Windows 7 SP1 and macOS 10.13 or later supported.
Both platforms require at least 4GB RAM (with 16GB recommended) and a 32-bit video card.
Even though InDesign is widely considered the ace advanced page-design tool, there are other notable page-layout applications in the arena.
For PC, Mac OS, and Linux, VivaDesigner from Germany offers an integrated word processor and a browser-based platform option.
QuarkXPress presents many similar capabilities, the differentiator being that it does not force you into a subscription.
On the PC you have Corel Draw 2019 and Xara Designer Pro X, which touts WYSIWYG web design and an onboard image editor.
The Path to InDesign
In the dawn of desktop publishing, there was Aldus PageMaker (InDesign's predecessor after Adobe purchased Aldus in 1994) and Quark Xpress, which offered more robust tools catering to a growing professional user base.
Adobe resisted Quark's acquisition attempts and forged through a PageMaker rewrite, and in 1999, introduced InDesign—the first Mac OS-native desktop publishing software.
Since then, designers and production artists have been using it to create a spectrum of print design deliverables—books, brochures, newspapers, and magazines—and more recently to produce ebooks, interactive PDFs, and other content for digital destinations.
InDesign's forte is assembling, designing, laying out, typesetting, and preflighting complex multipage layouts.
The program's project-specific workspaces, such as Interactive PDF, Advanced, or Digital Publishing, simplify your workflow as you begin.
Choose one of InDesign's preset workspaces, or make and save one of your own.
A good example of a project for which InDesign is eminently suited would be a user manual that requires a foreword with Arabic page numerals, chapter divisions with Roman letter page numbering, a variety of diagrams, and a comprehensive index.
After the design phase, in advance of printing or publishing, a comprehensive preflight panel helps troubleshoot the file, making certain there are no missing fonts, unlinked or low-resolution images, color inconsistencies, overset text, or other issues.
Typography Triumphs With Adobe Fonts
A pioneer of digital type for the Macintosh (having created PostScript), Adobe was early to the font scene with the 1988 launch of its must-have, tabloid-sized quarterly magazine and font catalog, Font&Function, wherein this question was posed: "Can a designer who loves good type, good design, and good taste find happiness on a desktop?" Today it's easy to answer in the affirmative.
Back then, designers would need to call the distributor to find the nearest dealer, phone in the order to the dealer, wait eagerly by the mailbox for their font to arrive on a set of floppy disks, before finally answering that, yes, fonts worked on the desktop.
Three decades later, working with type has just become more exciting, with the newly named Adobe Fonts (formerly TypeKit).
Within InDesign, subscribers now have unlimited access to the entire Adobe font library in both screen and downloadable desktop formats.
Added to that are the updated Character Panel's real-time visual font browsing (seeing your highlighted text displayed in the actual font) and improved search.
This means that when you engage the pull-down font menu, you see the fonts installed on your computer—as well as, if you like, the more than 14,000 fonts in the Adobe library.
Now we can sort and filter font attributes, classifications, starred favorites, or recently used categories to find—or discover—just what we have in mind.
There is even more InDesign font fun with newly compatible SVG OpenType Color Fonts.
These new full-color glyphs may seem a bit gimmicky to the professional designer and illustrator, but there is no denying that people are creating some interesting and beautiful illustrative type.
A note of caution: Take care to make sure you are using OpenType SVG (vector) fonts rather than bitmap color fonts, because in the latter each glyph is a raster image (as opposed to regular fonts being vector-based), so file sizes can get large.
Also, InDesign warns users of font limitations with these fonts.
Outlining and exporting to PDF aren't yet possible, for example.
Flex Your Layout Muscles
Have you ever had a client inform you—on round four or five—that they need to change the page size or orientation of your document? Of course you have! With the latest InDesign, it doesn't have to be the time-consuming grunt work that it used to be, thanks to the new Adjust Layout feature.
So, what's the difference between InDesign's new Adjust Layout and the Liquid Layout and Alternate Layouts tools introduced in CS6? Liquid Layout facilitates the process when you are tasked with designing alternative layouts to handle multiple page sizes (such as for a range of devices) by allowing you to create and apply specific rules (centering, scaling, and guide- and object-based) about the mechanics of how those changes adapt to various page situations.
This can be semi- or fully automatic.
While Alternate Layouts can be used in conjunction with Liquid Layout, the former feature is primarily geared to digital or print publication projects that require different layouts within the document.
Both systems reduce the manual work required to lay out every page in a document a second (or third, or fourth) time.
Adjust Layouts is the new utensil in this drawer of adaptive and responsive page-design tools, and you reach for it when you need to amend page properties (such as size, bleeds, and margins) of a document—after text and images are already in place.
You no longer need to live through yesterday's madness of page-by-page manual adjustment via the Document Setup or Margins and Columns pulldown.
Today, you have in-app options presented just by accessing that Document Setup menu and clicking Adjust Layout.
There you can change global page, margin, and bleed measurements—and even the font size.
You can also find another Adjust Layout option in the Margins and Columns dialog box to further assist with your reconfiguration requirements.
Of course, the discriminating designer can expect to make a few trials and perform tweaks, but the new Adjust Layout feature can save you time and agita the next time you need to adjust the page or spread layout of an entire document.
Adjust Layout semi-automates the process of reformatting a publication in a different size or orientation.
You'll find another keen new feature in the Frame Options panel.
Clicking on the Content-Aware Fit option after you have placed an image into an existing frame tells InDesign to guess the important part of the picture and resize the photo accordingly.
After placing an image into a frame, click the Content-Aware Fit option to have InDesign guess what's important to show.
The orange arrow shows the new content-aware option in the Framing dialog panel.
Pleasing Properties Panel
The additional convenience of InDesign's new Properties Panel decidedly supports Adobe's mission to accelerate users' workflows and improve the app's ease of use.
This new context-smart panel gathers and displays your most-often-used controls, along with relevant settings for your current task.
For the object you have selected (shape, text block, or linked image), the panel shows two sections of information.
First, there are the Transformation and Appearance controls and Settings (similar to the Appearance panel in sister app, Illustrator).
Next there are the Dynamic controls, which appear based on the context of what you are doing at the time of selection.
When you have nothing selected, the Properties Panel displays page-specific information concerning guides, units, and related preferences.
Three representative states of the new Properties Panel: (A) with nothing selected, (B) with a text frame selected, and (C) with a rectangle path selected.
New PDF Options
Adobe invented the Portable Document Format (PDF) in 1993, and with its free Adobe Acrobat Reader, transformed ease of communication between applications and platforms.
Now with the ability to import PDF edits and comments directly into the program, working with PDFs becomes even more convenient in InDesign.
There's no more back-and-forth between apps or split screens.
Furthermore, you can track and manage the subsequent feedback and comments of any marked-up PDF right from InDesign.
You now have a variety of options for exporting still and interactive PDFs.
My experience trying out this new feature was a bit clunky, however.
The copying and pasting process is finicky.
Also, when a comment is just a sticky note rather than a Strike or Insert directive, clicking on the comment icon takes you to the page in question, but does not indicate where on the page the actual comment was made.
There are a few important requirements to note: First, the PDF being commented upon must be made from the current version of InDesign; and second, the PDF comments can only be imported into the original InDesign file from which the PDF was made.
Since its introduction in CS5, InDesign's dynamic PDF form-making capability continues to bloom.
In addition to specifying fields such as text blocks, radio buttons, and check boxes, InDesign CC 2019 now supports form fields with customizable typeface control when you're exporting an InDesign file to an interactive PDF form—without the need to tweak the form in Acrobat.
Blazing New Trails
Though undisputed as the trailblazer of page and publication design, Adobe's distinguished and long-time champ InDesign doesn't rest on past and current achievements.
Adobe is advancing the cutting edge of how we work and what we create.
This, built on an already strong base of tools makes InDesign our top recommendation in the page-design category and a Daxdi Editors' Choice.
Pros
Superbly balanced interface.
Easy, smart automatic global page adjustment.
Contextual information at your fingertips.
Huge selection of downloadable fonts.
View More
The Bottom Line
InDesign maintains its relevance, giving the commercial creative of 2019 an edge in satisfying ever more-demanding client requests.
Despite minor quibbles, InDesign is a must-have for any professional designer.
The major message at this year's Adobe Max Conference was that in 2019, everyone can—and should—be more creative.
And why not? Powerful new features in the CC family can nurture anyone's creativity.
InDesign CC 2019, Adobe's acclaimed page composition program fits right in with this strategy, advancing the capability of design software, especially when it comes to the user experience.
Adobe is reimagining InDesign to accelerate workflows, liberate creativity, and encourage exploration—all while motivating us to embrace immersive new media.
Big changes in Adobe fonts, automatic layout adjustment, and a smart new Properties panel are just a few of the specific updates that make InDesign feel refreshed and attuned to the current design zeitgeist.
Pricing and Getting Started
InDesign is available only by subscription to Adobe Creative Cloud, either as a single app, for $20.99 per month, or as part of the entire design suite, for $52.99 per month.
Adobe's CC suite includes every arrow in Adobe's professional design software quiver, including Photoshop, Premiere Pro, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and more.
For comparison, Microsoft Publisher (Windows-only) comes with Office 365 subscriptions starting at $6.99 per month; QuarkXPress costs $849 (or $399 as a competitive upgrade); VivaDesigner starts at $139 for a permanent license with no subscription; and Xara Designer Pro X costs $299 as a one-shot or $5.95 per month as a subscription.
You can install InDesign on up to two computers simultaneously.
Mac and Windows versions interoperate, with Windows 7 SP1 and macOS 10.13 or later supported.
Both platforms require at least 4GB RAM (with 16GB recommended) and a 32-bit video card.
Even though InDesign is widely considered the ace advanced page-design tool, there are other notable page-layout applications in the arena.
For PC, Mac OS, and Linux, VivaDesigner from Germany offers an integrated word processor and a browser-based platform option.
QuarkXPress presents many similar capabilities, the differentiator being that it does not force you into a subscription.
On the PC you have Corel Draw 2019 and Xara Designer Pro X, which touts WYSIWYG web design and an onboard image editor.
The Path to InDesign
In the dawn of desktop publishing, there was Aldus PageMaker (InDesign's predecessor after Adobe purchased Aldus in 1994) and Quark Xpress, which offered more robust tools catering to a growing professional user base.
Adobe resisted Quark's acquisition attempts and forged through a PageMaker rewrite, and in 1999, introduced InDesign—the first Mac OS-native desktop publishing software.
Since then, designers and production artists have been using it to create a spectrum of print design deliverables—books, brochures, newspapers, and magazines—and more recently to produce ebooks, interactive PDFs, and other content for digital destinations.
InDesign's forte is assembling, designing, laying out, typesetting, and preflighting complex multipage layouts.
The program's project-specific workspaces, such as Interactive PDF, Advanced, or Digital Publishing, simplify your workflow as you begin.
Choose one of InDesign's preset workspaces, or make and save one of your own.
A good example of a project for which InDesign is eminently suited would be a user manual that requires a foreword with Arabic page numerals, chapter divisions with Roman letter page numbering, a variety of diagrams, and a comprehensive index.
After the design phase, in advance of printing or publishing, a comprehensive preflight panel helps troubleshoot the file, making certain there are no missing fonts, unlinked or low-resolution images, color inconsistencies, overset text, or other issues.
Typography Triumphs With Adobe Fonts
A pioneer of digital type for the Macintosh (having created PostScript), Adobe was early to the font scene with the 1988 launch of its must-have, tabloid-sized quarterly magazine and font catalog, Font&Function, wherein this question was posed: "Can a designer who loves good type, good design, and good taste find happiness on a desktop?" Today it's easy to answer in the affirmative.
Back then, designers would need to call the distributor to find the nearest dealer, phone in the order to the dealer, wait eagerly by the mailbox for their font to arrive on a set of floppy disks, before finally answering that, yes, fonts worked on the desktop.
Three decades later, working with type has just become more exciting, with the newly named Adobe Fonts (formerly TypeKit).
Within InDesign, subscribers now have unlimited access to the entire Adobe font library in both screen and downloadable desktop formats.
Added to that are the updated Character Panel's real-time visual font browsing (seeing your highlighted text displayed in the actual font) and improved search.
This means that when you engage the pull-down font menu, you see the fonts installed on your computer—as well as, if you like, the more than 14,000 fonts in the Adobe library.
Now we can sort and filter font attributes, classifications, starred favorites, or recently used categories to find—or discover—just what we have in mind.
There is even more InDesign font fun with newly compatible SVG OpenType Color Fonts.
These new full-color glyphs may seem a bit gimmicky to the professional designer and illustrator, but there is no denying that people are creating some interesting and beautiful illustrative type.
A note of caution: Take care to make sure you are using OpenType SVG (vector) fonts rather than bitmap color fonts, because in the latter each glyph is a raster image (as opposed to regular fonts being vector-based), so file sizes can get large.
Also, InDesign warns users of font limitations with these fonts.
Outlining and exporting to PDF aren't yet possible, for example.
Flex Your Layout Muscles
Have you ever had a client inform you—on round four or five—that they need to change the page size or orientation of your document? Of course you have! With the latest InDesign, it doesn't have to be the time-consuming grunt work that it used to be, thanks to the new Adjust Layout feature.
So, what's the difference between InDesign's new Adjust Layout and the Liquid Layout and Alternate Layouts tools introduced in CS6? Liquid Layout facilitates the process when you are tasked with designing alternative layouts to handle multiple page sizes (such as for a range of devices) by allowing you to create and apply specific rules (centering, scaling, and guide- and object-based) about the mechanics of how those changes adapt to various page situations.
This can be semi- or fully automatic.
While Alternate Layouts can be used in conjunction with Liquid Layout, the former feature is primarily geared to digital or print publication projects that require different layouts within the document.
Both systems reduce the manual work required to lay out every page in a document a second (or third, or fourth) time.
Adjust Layouts is the new utensil in this drawer of adaptive and responsive page-design tools, and you reach for it when you need to amend page properties (such as size, bleeds, and margins) of a document—after text and images are already in place.
You no longer need to live through yesterday's madness of page-by-page manual adjustment via the Document Setup or Margins and Columns pulldown.
Today, you have in-app options presented just by accessing that Document Setup menu and clicking Adjust Layout.
There you can change global page, margin, and bleed measurements—and even the font size.
You can also find another Adjust Layout option in the Margins and Columns dialog box to further assist with your reconfiguration requirements.
Of course, the discriminating designer can expect to make a few trials and perform tweaks, but the new Adjust Layout feature can save you time and agita the next time you need to adjust the page or spread layout of an entire document.
Adjust Layout semi-automates the process of reformatting a publication in a different size or orientation.
You'll find another keen new feature in the Frame Options panel.
Clicking on the Content-Aware Fit option after you have placed an image into an existing frame tells InDesign to guess the important part of the picture and resize the photo accordingly.
After placing an image into a frame, click the Content-Aware Fit option to have InDesign guess what's important to show.
The orange arrow shows the new content-aware option in the Framing dialog panel.
Pleasing Properties Panel
The additional convenience of InDesign's new Properties Panel decidedly supports Adobe's mission to accelerate users' workflows and improve the app's ease of use.
This new context-smart panel gathers and displays your most-often-used controls, along with relevant settings for your current task.
For the object you have selected (shape, text block, or linked image), the panel shows two sections of information.
First, there are the Transformation and Appearance controls and Settings (similar to the Appearance panel in sister app, Illustrator).
Next there are the Dynamic controls, which appear based on the context of what you are doing at the time of selection.
When you have nothing selected, the Properties Panel displays page-specific information concerning guides, units, and related preferences.
Three representative states of the new Properties Panel: (A) with nothing selected, (B) with a text frame selected, and (C) with a rectangle path selected.
New PDF Options
Adobe invented the Portable Document Format (PDF) in 1993, and with its free Adobe Acrobat Reader, transformed ease of communication between applications and platforms.
Now with the ability to import PDF edits and comments directly into the program, working with PDFs becomes even more convenient in InDesign.
There's no more back-and-forth between apps or split screens.
Furthermore, you can track and manage the subsequent feedback and comments of any marked-up PDF right from InDesign.
You now have a variety of options for exporting still and interactive PDFs.
My experience trying out this new feature was a bit clunky, however.
The copying and pasting process is finicky.
Also, when a comment is just a sticky note rather than a Strike or Insert directive, clicking on the comment icon takes you to the page in question, but does not indicate where on the page the actual comment was made.
There are a few important requirements to note: First, the PDF being commented upon must be made from the current version of InDesign; and second, the PDF comments can only be imported into the original InDesign file from which the PDF was made.
Since its introduction in CS5, InDesign's dynamic PDF form-making capability continues to bloom.
In addition to specifying fields such as text blocks, radio buttons, and check boxes, InDesign CC 2019 now supports form fields with customizable typeface control when you're exporting an InDesign file to an interactive PDF form—without the need to tweak the form in Acrobat.
Blazing New Trails
Though undisputed as the trailblazer of page and publication design, Adobe's distinguished and long-time champ InDesign doesn't rest on past and current achievements.
Adobe is advancing the cutting edge of how we work and what we create.
This, built on an already strong base of tools makes InDesign our top recommendation in the page-design category and a Daxdi Editors' Choice.
Pros
Superbly balanced interface.
Easy, smart automatic global page adjustment.
Contextual information at your fingertips.
Huge selection of downloadable fonts.
View More
The Bottom Line
InDesign maintains its relevance, giving the commercial creative of 2019 an edge in satisfying ever more-demanding client requests.
Despite minor quibbles, InDesign is a must-have for any professional designer.
