Interesting topic And one that will certainly have people taking sides…

I know quite a few people and companies who set ads in InDesign. Most advertising agencies here use InDesign for setting of ads, and local news and community newspapers also use InDesign to set their ads. In some cases with a little help from some scripts.

On the other hand I know several companies who create advertising driven publications (e.g. similar to an auto-trader, classified ads, yellow pages), that set all their ads in Illustrator and do page composition in InDesign.

My guess it, that it really is a personal choice. For ads that are made up of many tiny text components that need to be easily moved around a page, possibly Illustrator would be the better tool.

However Illustrator handles image masking different to InDesign, and quite often users prefer the InDesign method of placing images in a graphic frame and having the ability to easily move them around and change their crop and resize them.

In addition, for something like car-ads, you could work with InDesign’s nested and next styles to quite quickly format the text, and use the multi-image place functinality to quickly replace a series of images in these image heavy ads.

Both .indd and .ai files can be placed natively in InDesign for page composition.

So without taking sides, I would say the preference in application really depends heavily on the type of ads that are being set.

I have a comment/question. I have not gone over your entire website, so the answer might be there. I just want to get your take on this issue. Would you be willing to comment on this dilemma?

I am working freelance for a coupon magazine circular. I am doing graphics, illustration and layout for the coupons. The company wants everything done in Adobe InDesign.

What I discovered is this. The InDesign text box does not lend itself for the way they are building their ads. Each line needs to be unique. So they take the time to draw the text box and have to select every letter in the text box to change color and resize their text boxes or they create a lot of layers and have giant text boxes with text in it all overlapping. I resize my text boxes so there is less time to to select thru layers i.e. less of chance to accidentally select a text box I do not want.

I went into Adobe Illustrator simply clicked down the text tool started typing and the text box automatically takes on the size of the the text and I can simply select the word with a click of the mouse without dragging the mouse over all the letters to select a new color for the text. And there seem to be some other quicker design/typography issues that seem faster in Illustrator that have come about like resizing the shape of the type.

So I tried telling the owner that InDesign is used more for book, magazine and brochure layout.

So I believe that using InDesign to do the majority of the work for these ads is a time waster and the owner is getting impatient about time issues/deadlines. And the designers do not want to switch over to using Illustrator even though they own a package of Illustrator.

What is your opinion on this?

Thank you so much for your time!
Bruce
Appleton, WI
USA