When you’ve got a new project on your hands, one of the first questions you probably ask yourself is, “Which design product should I use to make this?” With so many different applications, how do you know if you are using the best application for what you’re trying to accomplish? What if you only have access to one product? Can you still complete your design?
To help you get started, we’ve created an easy reference for some of the most common design projects and the products you can use to create them. And check out our new tutorial here.
First thing’s first — use what you know.
“The first thing to understand is that many of the Creative Cloud applications overlap some in their functionality,” Brian Barrus, president and creative director at Studio Element, says, “so a big part of which product you use comes down to personal preference and how familiar and comfortable you are with different apps.”
If you feel confident using one program but have never scratched the surface of another, have no fear. There’s a good chance you can use the program you already know to complete your project. And when you’re ready to broaden your horizons, the even better news is that most Adobe products share very similar design language in their interfaces. Tools tend to be found in roughly the same places from one app to the next.
That being said, there is a clear advantage to broadening your familiarity across the product set. Each app has its own strengths, and professional designers use each product accordingly — often using multiple applications on a single project. For simplicity’s sake, in this guide we’ll focus on the big three design products: Photoshop, Illustrator, and InDesign.
Harness each program’s strengths.
To help you get a better feel for the general strengths of each app, let’s review them briefly.
Photoshop: Photoshop does the best work on raster images (pixel-based), like photographs. It shines doing tasks like adjusting brightness, colorizing, cutting an element from the background, or blending multiple images into a collage. Photoshop is really best as an image editor and can also be useful for video and animations.
Illustrator: Illustrator is the go-to tool for creating logos or other illustrations. Its major advantage is that it works in vector format. Rather than storing individual pixels, vector art stores points and equations, meaning that you can create an image and scale it down to a business card or up to billboard size without any pixilation (loss of graphical quality). The catch to vector art is that it tends to be less visually complex than raster art. You are unlikely to create photorealistic images with vector art, but it does work well for typography.
InDesign: InDesign is a publishing tool at its heart. It’s built around the task of page-layouts and is the perfect app for arranging elements or creating multi-page documents, like brochures or catalogs. InDesign simplifies the creation of long-form documents with tools like ‘master pages’ and text and typography styles. InDesign is excellent for organizing visual elements on a page, but it is limited in terms of image creation or editing tools.
Reference this guide.
To close out this primer, let’s spend a moment running through some of the most common projects you’ll find (in alphabetical order, for easy reference) and our recommendations for which tools will work the best. Keep in mind that most of these projects will have multiple elements, and those elements will lend themselves to different tools.
Book Cover:
- Any of the 3 apps could be used for book cover design, so the recommendation is really to go where you’re most comfortable. The key is to consider your vision for the final product. For visually complex covers with photorealism, consider Photoshop. For covers with many elements or extensive text, go with InDesign. For more expressive covers that blend illustration with expressive typography, Illustrator is probably best.
