InDesign or Photoshop? How to know which platforms to use for your projects.

​I’m starting a new series of topics that will hopefully help new designers on their journey. First up- knowing which program to use. For the purposes of this article, we will only focus on Adobe programs, as those are the industry standard.
 
Brief breakdown:

Adobe Illustrator: Just like the name says, it’s used for illustrating. It’s what you want to use if you’re creating logos. It can also be used for designing a poster, or postcard, although I prefer InDesign for those. Illustrator creates vector files, and allows you to save the files as AI (Adobe Illustrator), EPS (Encapsulated PostScript), PDF, or SVG, amongst others. You will mostly save files as EPS or PDF, unless saving them for web use.

Adobe Photoshop: Photoshop is THE tool to use to edit photos. Most photographers will use Lightroom to edit their photos, but Photoshop is where you would go to remove a stray sign, clean up a tabletop, or edit the color of a flower. Some people use Photoshop for layout, but there are MUCH better programs you can use that give you more flexibility and control.

Adobe InDesign: InDesign was Adobe’s answer to QuarkXpress. InDesign came along, and quickly took over as the go-to layout tool. InDesign was created to integrate seamlessly with Photoshop and Illustrator. It also addressed several of the issues people had with Quark, such as poor customer service. Quark has made huge strides, but it’s too little, too late now. InDesign has such a stronghold on the market, Quark stands little chance of making a comeback.
 
InDesign is mainly a page layout program, used to lay out every from books and newspapers, to postcards and business cards. It especially shines when laying out multi-page documents, although I personally use it to layout just about everything.
 
Have more questions about how to use these? Shoot me a message!