InDesign versus Illustrator

[Brandin]

A lot of people are talking about using what you know best, or what
will get it done the fastest. Depending on the level of designer you
are, you would use the the program for what it's meant for. A well
educated designer knows that ID is what you use for every project you
can that is destined for offset printing or in-depth PDF's (hyperlinks,
animation, go-to functions). It supports so many features and allows a
true designer creative control over the designs typography. Many people
buy the Adobe CS because it's such a great value, but are intimidated
by ID becasue of it's complexity. If you wanted to truly have powerful
tools at your fingertips, you would use ID. Illustrator does serve
great functions (and I love it for it's purpose) for single page
layouts or "quicky" Kinkos prints, and if that's all you do, that's
fine. ID is a professional level appplication and when used correctly
can yield far better results when you know how to use it. I'm not
saying Illustrator isn't professional level, but many more people "buy"
it and sort of learn it, becasue it's more "fun." Illistrate withh
Illustrator, and design your pages with ID. That's my opinion...

[Brandin]

A lot of people are talking about using what you know best, or what
will get it done the fastest. Depending on the level of designer you
are, you would use the the program for what it's meant for. A well
educated designer knows that ID is what you use for every project you
can that is destined for offset printing or in-depth PDF's (hyperlinks,

animation, go-to functions). It supports so many features and allows a
true designer creative control over the designs typography. Many people

buy the Adobe CS because it's such a great value, but are intimidated
by ID because of it's complexity. If you wanted to truly have powerful
tools at your fingertips, you would use ID. Illustrator does serve
great functions (and I love it for it's purpose) for single page
layouts or "quicky" Kinkos prints, and if that's all you do, that's
fine. ID is a professional level application and when used correctly
can yield far better results when you know how to use it. I'm not
saying Illustrator isn't professional level, but many more people "buy"

it and sort of learn it, because it's more "fun." Illustrate with
Illustrator, and design your pages with ID. That's my opinion...

[Unregistered]

For experimental layouts, Illustrator WINS.

InDesign is great for how it manages flowing text and a lot of things, but when you want to do something more experimental - i.e., overlapping text and images, merging with illustrations, even just experimenting with dynamic/unorthodox layout, Illy wins, hands down.

You can convert the text to outlines (or not, depending), bring in your illustrations, and integrate, stretch, distort, or merge them as you please - experimentation is relatively instantaneous and unrestrained. Guides can be used to create a custom grid, and I find the act of creating / refining the grids is an important part of the design process itself, and Illustrator doesn't lack in this as compared to ID.

InDesign, on the other hand, encourages the user to take the tools (which are great) and produce more standard layouts - partially because it's more complex to stray from formulas with ID, in part because the available tools are too good to pass by - if you can drive in automatic, why would you experiment with manual shifting? Illustrator's simplicity allows me to look at the page as what it is - a page. And to tackle this with less preconceived notions. It might be that I'm biased, and I certainly am. For an experimental layout art exhibition catalogue PDF, I'm using Illustrator to compile it, though it's many pages. I simply use separate artboards for each page - and I don't see this as a bad work around at all. Artboards have their own benefits, including being able to overlap and nest them, thus giving you the chance to export/save the same image cropped or framed differently, something you can't do with stricter layout programs.

It's like the McLuhan argument: we shape the tools, and in return the tools shape us. I find that sticking to InDesign ONLY limits me as a designer, since I then find myself sticking to formulas because the tools simply don't lend themselves to experimentation as much.

So... while I respect the views about the great tools ID offers, I usually go with illustrator when I'm trying to do something new - which hopefully, is always. If it wasn't for the improved artboard functionality with CS5 (maybe also in CS3-4?) I would totally agree that multi-page documents don't fly in Illy. But it's a brave new world =)