What is Adobe InDesign?

What is Adobe InDesign?

InDesign does page layouts. It allows you to produce and preview documents for magazines, both in print and online across mobile and desktop platforms. It offers more precision with typography than Photoshop, but less in the graphics department. InDesign is made for publishing. Ideally, projects rendered are newspapers, posters, and other marketing material. The way InDesign works allow content producers to quickly piece together the layouts for multipage magazines and documents. InDesign operates seamlessly with the rest of the Adobe suite, to enhance creative ability. The latest version incorporates interactive HTML within documents to allow web publishing.

Overall, if you need to create a layout for something with a lot of text and graphics, InDesign is just about the best software out there for it.


Adobe creates a lot of programs, many of which I found myself unfamiliar with until recently. Most people know about Flash, Photoshop, and Adobe Reader. But those aren’t the only programs Adobe develops. In the past, it was a fairly large investment to buy the suite however in recent years, =standing each of Adobe’s software programs.

In the 6th iteration of the Adobe Creative Suite (that’s where the “CS” comes from), there are 16 programs. In addition to the Creative Suite, there are several other suites and enterprise products. For time’s sake, I’ll just focus on the primary 16.

Photoshop® CS6 Extended
Illustrator® CS6
InDesign® CS6
Acrobat® X Pro
Flash® Professional CS6
Flash Builder® 4.6 Premium Edition
Dreamweaver® CS6
Fireworks® CS6

Adobe Premiere® Pro CS6
After Effects® CS6
Adobe Audition® CS6
SpeedGrade™ CS6
Prelude™ CS6
Encore® CS6
Bridge CS6
Media Encoder CS6