Adobe In. Design CS6 Review & Rating. Page designers these days are about as focused on the printed page as writers are—that is, not so much. Both professions have bloomed onto new mediums, like websites, ereaders, and smartphones. Adobe In. Design is the go- to application for page designers the world over, and the latest version goes to great lengths to help these professionals keep pace with new trends in digital publishing. Adobe In. Design CS6 ($6. Welcome to InDesign CS6 Essential Training. InDesign CS6 is a professional design and layout tool used by almost every graphic designer. CS5. 5; $2. 49 upgrade from CS3, CS4, and CS5) easily earns a five- star rating and our Editors' Choice for its wonderful flexibility and creativity- boosting enhancements for designers. No one is saying In. Design is perfect, but it's far better than it ever has been, and version CS6 pushes the software further in the right direction, with additions like Alternate Layouts, Liquid Layout, and Content Collector. Surely, Adobe will refine, improve, and otherwise tweak these new features in future releases as working pros provide feedback, and as the digital publishing landscape itself evolves. Still, as it stands in CS6, Adobe In. Design empowers page designers and graphic artists with a fantastic set of tools, a flexible work environment, and a keen sense of what will be important to them next. Interface. Adobe In. Design CS6 sports the same familiar interface of other recent versions of the page- design program. In the past, Adobe (and other graphic arts software makers) took a lot of heat for delivering cramped and cluttered workspaces. But I find it hard to complain about In. Design anymore. Menus and toolbars snap in and out of place easily. Preset buttons let you switch quickly from one customized set of tools to another. In In. Design, I think Adobe has found an ideal balance by providing more than enough features but not cramming them all onto the screen at once. In its official press materials, Adobe doesn't even mention In. Design's interface, because it's no different than before. But to me, that says Adobe got it right. And I think that's worth an acknowledgment. New Features. Alternate Layout. Designers, especially those who make marketing materials, know that one project is never a single piece of work. That poster you spent two weeks creating? It also needs to be a banner, a direct mail card, and oh, did anyone mention the new i. Phone app that will have the same look? In. Design's new Alternate Layout feature removes much (but not all) of the tedium of replicating and reconfiguring content for different page dimensions and uses. Say you've designed a two- page magazine spread that needs to be ported for viewing on an i. Pad. Plus, that new workspace is right in the same document in which you started. It's still up to you, the designer, to figure out how to fit the page elements onto the new layout (unless you use Liquid Rules, discussed in more detail below), but In. Design at least gets you started by laying out all the pieces of the puzzle. Liquid Layouts. Think of Liquid Layouts as template rules for porting content. This new feature lets you set up rules for moving content from one layout to an alternate one, which is helpful if you tend to design for the same dimensions and platforms over and over again. You can scale content, re- center it, and align assets to guides. There's also an object- based rule that lets you tell In. Design how to adjust a specific object and where to place it. InDesign CS6 Interactive PDF Export dialog. See the new Pages/Spreads radio button near the top. Creating accessible PDF documents with Adobe . It’s critical that content is accessible to the widest possible. Create alternate layouts in Adobe. Use Liquid Layout to automatically adjust content based on rules you. InDesign is an essential tool for designers, ad agencies, magazines, newspapers, book publishers, and freelancers around the world. It's used to build everything from. Liquid Layouts don't make the work a cakewalk by any means, but they can cut out a lot of time for designers who adapt the same kinds of content from one template to another over and over again. Neither Liquid Layouts nor Alternate Layouts perfectly and magically create good- looking final products—but if they did, you'd be largely out of the job. What these two features do provide is a bit of automation and speed for the annoying parts of the process, and I for one am happy to see them included in CS6. Linked Content. Linked content is exactly what it sounds like: assets, repurposed across pages—or, wait for it. It is yet another feature for busy designers who spit out six or seven iterations of the same content, only to hear that the boss no longer likes green and wants blue used throughout. When content is linked, changing one asset changes them all. If you open a document with linked assets that have been changed, In. Design throws a warning icon before pulling in the updated item, giving you a chance to unlink them if you need. Content Collector. My first impression of the Content Collector was: ? In. Design's Content Collector pops onto the bottom of your screen when you select it from the main toolbar, and it serves as a place to collect assets for reuse, such as logos and boiler plate text. You can grab anything on the page in front of you and send it to the Collector, and you can reuse any assets that you've saved there, even if it's from another document. One way Corel's tray trumps In. Design's, though, is how it interacts with online materials. Corel. DRAW lets you export all the assets on a Web page from any URL and save them to the tray. It also lets you search online for images you might want to use in your work and plop them into the tray for easy access (you still have to acquire a high- resolution image for final use later, but the advantage is you can try out a number of creative ideas quickly). Corel also lets you set up and name multiple trays, whereas In. Design only has one. Support for PDF Fields. One last feature addition to note: In. Design now lets you build interactive PDFs, which makes sense, seeing that it's Adobe In. Design. Forms, like membership applications or enrollment paperwork, that page designers used to push to programmers to build, are now possible to create with simple buttons in In. Design. In testing the software, I didn't find all the options completely straightforward, but that may have more to do with my lack of PDF knowledge than the utility of the tools. The simplest ones, however, like creating checkboxes and yes/no selections, took hardly any effort to include on a document. A Brilliant Design. Adobe In. Design CS6 remains the number- one professional page- design software on the market, and there's no question that it deserves an Editors' Choice. Adobe has done an outstanding job of getting this application to a very refined and easy- to- use state. Designers working in multiple mediums, from print to mobile platforms to ebooks, will find In. Design goes a long way toward making their jobs simpler, automating the process of porting and reconfiguring page assets as much as it can. More Photo, Video, and Graphics Software Reviews.
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