Illustrator vs. InDesign: When to use which design application.

Graphics, meet text.

A good magazine or newspaper doesn’t communicate with just words. Quality publications use layout and visual elements to convey information too. Readers can usually tell a lot about a publication before reading even a single headline. Font sizes in headlines, page designs and photo placement, and even the presence of serif or sans serif fonts all convey important information to a reader.

Adobe Illustrator and Adobe InDesign each have a role to play in creating print and digital publications. With Illustrator, creators can make the graphics and other assets that draw readers’ attention. With InDesign, they can craft layouts that let all of the information, text and visuals alike, exist harmoniously on the page.

When to use Illustrator.

Illustrator is a graphic design and illustration application for creating vector images, which are easy to manipulate, especially in digital publishing. Logos, graphs, and branded icons are all usually vectors, as these graphics often have to appear in multiple formats in different assets, and vector images are much easier to resize than pixel-based graphics. Illustrator is the go-to application to customize typography in logos or make the clean lines that make up an easy-to-understand graph.

Vector vs. raster graphics.

Vector graphics are infinitely scalable because they are based on mathematical formulas. Raster images — i.e., graphics based on pixels — will blur or lose detail if scaled up or down too much and, at larger sizes, inevitably show pixelation.

However, vector graphics can fit with ease on a surface as small as a business card or as large as a billboard. The relationships and ratios between points are always the same regardless of size, so vector graphics are often more flexible than raster graphics.

Sketch your ideas, literally.

Graphic designers and artists can create vector graphics in several ways in Illustrator, including with a stylus. Creators can easily take an electronic pen in hand to make sketches that become art, logos, portraits, cartoons. Draw in Illustrator with different digital pens, brushes, and pencils, and choose from a variety of paper and canvas types to achieve an analog look within a digital environment.

Customize grids, craft templates.

InDesign includes customizable grids and guides to assist with layout and typesetting. With the Master Pages feature, editors can create templates you can use across different sections, chapters, and publications. This includes turning Illustrator graphics into recurring visual assets within a publication, such as chapter headers, mastheads, or logos.

Find your type.

InDesign excels as an app where you can experiment with and customize typography by choosing from hundreds of different fonts and manipulating their kerning, dimensions, and style. With the Paragraph Styles feature, you can curate a custom in-house style guide for your publication, with consistent paragraph styles, kerning, and leading across your publications. Make your lettering uniquely yours, and document how you want everything to look, from page one headlines to tiny footnotes.

Use Illustrator and InDesign together.

Any project that features text and imagery can benefit from both apps — Illustrator and InDesign are both part of Creative Cloud and are designed to work together. Illustrator is where you can create all of the visual assets for a book or other publication, and InDesign is where you lay out those graphics with text.

When Illustrator and InDesign work well together.

Traditional long-form media projects are creative opportunities where Illustrator and InDesign combine nicely. Projects may include:

• Annual reports that display infographics and charts made in Illustrator, alongside text arranged in InDesign
• Digital publications that show off web graphics and images next to neat, readable columns of text
• Brochures, pamphlets, and other pocket publications
• Signs and billboards that combine images and text
• Personal projects like zines, invitations, and announcements

Like all Creative Cloud applications, Illustrator and InDesign also work seamlessly with other applications like Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop Lightroom. Graphic designers can use Photoshop as the basis for illustrations, and editors can easily work high-quality photos into their page layouts.

It all adds up to a memorable publication, one that showcases the know-how of professionals like artists and writers and the clean functionality of Adobe products.