We live in a digital world, which means that no matter which industry you work in, you’re likely to run across some kind of technology. The question is, for your interests and career goals, what technology skills are likely to be most helpful to learn.
Adobe products are standard in many industries and are well-known and well-established as cutting edge technologies. If you’re looking to boost your technology skills set, choosing an Adobe program might be beneficial. Knowing what industries use the program and how it’s used will be helpful as you determine where to start.
These five industries use Adobe InDesign in their everyday production, and here's what it’s used for.
Book Publishing
Book publishing is a long-standing industry that has continued to grow and branch out since printing became possible in the 1400s.
There are many professions within the book publishing industry, many of which are creative in nature. These jobs work with words every day, often quite a few of them.
For these word-loving experts, InDesign is a must-have program. The most common ways InDesign is used within the book publishing industry are for book covers, typesetting & book interiors, and eBooks.
Book Covers
Nothing can quite replace a first impression, which is why book covers are critical. Despite the old saying that you shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, many readers do. When design professionals in the book publishing world create these pieces of artwork, they have to be able to bring their creative vision to life, including text, images, and often other illustrations or images. InDesign was built for publishing and publishing design, which makes it a no-brainer for designing book covers.
Typesetting & Book Interiors
When you read a book, chances are you don’t necessarily notice the typesetting unless there are interesting formatting features or something feels “off” about it. All the details that make a book easy to read such as margins, font, font size, and page numbers are specifically designed and typeset for each book. Because InDesign specializes in long and text-heavy documents, it’s perfect to create the interiors of books with hundreds (or even thousands) of pages.
eBooks
Although eBooks have been around since the early 1970s (when the first Project Gutenberg scan was completed), they’ve become popular in recent years because of the widespread development of eReaders and mobile apps. Like print books, publishing industry professionals can use InDesign to create the covers and inside materials for eBooks. They can also add interactive elements, such as a clickable, hyperlinked table of contents.
Magazines & Newspapers
Newspapers and magazines have been around for hundreds of years - long before computers and the age of the internet. People read and learned about the world through these publications from politics to fashion, and even etiquette.
Although they’ve changed over the years, magazines and newspapers are still being published today both in print and digitally. Jobs within this industry are often similar to those in book publishing with the caveat that these shorter publications are typically more visual with a greater mixture of image, text, and design.
For professionals in the magazine & newspaper industry, InDesign is indispensable. The common tasks InDesign is used for are publication layout design, full-page spreads, and multi-page layouts.
Publication Layout Design
Whether a newspaper or magazine is printed or digitally distributed, each section is deliberately designed to be interesting, eye-catching, and readable. When you’re simply reading an article, it might seem like there’s not much to it, but in reality, all of the elements have to be displayed appropriately to ensure you won’t notice them—details such as spacing between lines, margins, and font size. InDesign allows for each element to be individually designed with text and images for as many pages as professionals in this industry want or need.
Full-Page Spreads
When you open a magazine to the middle, there’s often a large, two-page graphic that extends to the edges of both pages. This is called a full-page spread, and InDesign is used to create seamless designs for these layouts, too. It has features for lining up text and images, as well as guides for where the canvas ends. There are even print options to tell the program whether your document will be digital or printed, which allows it to optimize the quality of the file and ensure professionally designed layouts look as crisp and clean in their final form as they do during the initial design.
Multi-Page Layouts
For publications that run longer features, having a program to design multi-page layouts is critical. It needs to be easy for readers to make the jump from the beginning of the article to wherever it continues with as little interruption as possible so they don’t lose focus and quit reading altogether. Because InDesign was built for text-heavy documents, and documents extending over many pages, it’s a natural fit for these multi-page layout designs. Whether publishing professionals need to create full-page spreads, double-page spreads (those on the front and back of a page), or even longer features, InDesign can handle the project with ease.
Graphic Design
Graphic design is a broad industry that includes many facets of creative work.
At the most basic level, Graphic Designers are professionals who communicate through visual representations. They can inform, inspire action, and connect directly with their audience through creative graphics.
There are graphic designers who specialize in almost every type of design work and work within different industries. Some work on promotional materials like flyers and mailers. Some design books and magazines. There are virtually limitless options for skilled graphic designers.
Graphic designers who work with a substantial amount of text with images likely use InDesign. A few common tasks professionals in the graphic design industry use InDesign for are branding documents, stationery, event invitations, and newsletters.
Branding Documents
Graphic design professionals, especially those who work closely with marketers, can develop branding materials for a business. While InDesign isn’t the ideal program for logos (Illustrator or Photoshop are best for those), anything that needs quite a bit of text can be designed within the program. Items like letterhead and business cards are often created in InDesign because of the unique ways users can manipulate text and typesetting.
Stationery & Event Invitations
It’s likely you’ve received an event invitation, or seen what many call “fancy” stationery at the store. These printed materials often come with beautiful colors and fonts, even sometimes shapes, and are known for being pretty. Within graphic design, InDesign is a useful tool for creating designs like these because of the flexibility to work with space and text on the canvas, as well as combine graphics and text.
Newsletters
Many newsletters, whether digital or print, are multi-page documents that share updates and images the audience wants to hear about. These elements are InDesign’s bread and butter. It excels at longer documents, particularly those with a combination of images and text. For the Graphic Designer needing to put together a professional and appealing newsletter, this program is ideal.
Marketing & Advertising
Many times when people hear the term marketing, or advertising, they sigh and roll their eyes. The industry has a reputation for being irritating. Although they work together, marketing and advertising aren’t the same.
Marketing is the overall industry, and advertising is a practice that falls within it. The reason this is an important distinction is that a marketer’s job is to figure out what customers want and need, and how to best meet those needs. Advertising is one strategy marketers use to sell products and create brand awareness.
Many Marketers & Advertisers use materials comprised of both text and graphics. InDesign was designed for this purpose, which makes it an excellent design tool for the industry. Some common InDesign tasks within the marketing and advertising industry include: printed promotional materials, email marketing, and catalogs.
Printed Promotional Materials & Document Design
Have you ever been to a presentation and received a brochure? Or gotten pamphlets in the mail from local businesses? That’s promotional material. In marketing & advertising, promotional materials are shared to boost brand awareness and sales. Some other common forms of promotional materials include pens, t-shirts, coffee mugs, and branded packaging. InDesign is an effective tool for creating layouts for these highly designed promotional materials and documents because of the ability to seamlessly place text and images on the design, as well as create layout templates that can be used more than once.
Email Marketing
Email marketing is an essential part of the marketing industry because it converts more sales than any other platform, including social media. Marketers also “own” their email list, which means they could still contact their audience even if social media disappeared. With all the competition out there, though, emails have to be enticing in order to be clicked and read—let alone make a sale. InDesign offers templates for engaging email newsletters, complete with clean lines and a good text to image ratio, which makes it a clear asset to the industry.
Catalogues
We may not have many printed catalogues these days, but there are plenty of digital ones in use every day. Each time you visit a website with products, they’re displayed in catalogues. Around specific holidays, printed catalogues are shared in local papers and sent through the mail to potential customers who might shop the sale. These intricate, often lengthy documents, are created in InDesign. The program was built to handle large amounts of text and images in an aesthetically pleasing way, which means catalogues are basically an ideal InDesign project.
Corporate Communications
If you’ve ever worked in an office environment, or any professional workplace, you’ll know there’s a good deal of communication. This “corporate” communication is often different from friendly banter with co-workers or family members and has its own standards for what’s acceptable.
Every company is different, and the types of communication vary by industry, but there are certain communications that happen almost everywhere—items such as proposals and reports.
Often these materials are expected to look and feel a specific way, and to be on-brand. For professionals who are in charge of writing and sending official corporate communications regularly, InDesign provides a convenient place to design professional but visually appealing documents. Common corporate communications tasks completed in InDesign are Architecture & Engineering tasks, proposals, reports, and marketing materials.
Architecture & Engineering
Within the industries of Architecture & Engineering, there are many creative tasks. These design professionals create presentation boards to pitch their ideas to new clients and maintain a portfolio of their work to remind clients and employers of their experiences (and obtain new clients or employers). For such important visual documents, getting the text and images right is key, one of InDesign’s best functions.
Proposals
In the business world, businesses propose their products, projects, and services to potential buyers or investors. This is how they obtain business, forge collaborations, and build a customer base. It stands to reason that these proposals are often key documents in securing financing and customers. They must communicate clearly, and be laid out to ensure they’re easy to understand. Because they can be up to hundreds of pages long depending on the industry, there’s no better software to use than the long document king of software InDesign.
Reports
Items such as financial reports or annual reports are common in almost every industry. Some professions and job roles handle more reports than others. InDesign is used for many types of reports because of the ability to create practical but aesthetically pleasing templates. Templates make filling in tedious reports more efficient, which is a big bonus for those in charge of sending and maintaining them.
Marketing Materials
Have you ever been to a presentation and received a brochure? Or gotten a pamphlet in your mailbox? That’s marketing material. In marketing & advertising, materials are shared to boost brand awareness and sales. Some other common forms of promotional materials include brochures, pens, keychains, and branded packaging. InDesign is an effective tool for creating the longer and more text-heavy marketing materials because of its exceptional handling of typesetting and templates.
Where to Learn Adobe InDesign
If you’re ready to learn InDesign, there are several good options in-person, live online, and as part of certification programs.
Noble Desktop offers several InDesign classes. For those looking to pick up knowledge quickly, InDesign in a Day might be a great option. If you want a deeper, more foundational understanding, Adobe InDesign Bootcamp is a longer, more comprehensive course. In addition, there’s a Graphic Design Certificate option, which includes InDesign coursework.
If you don’t like the idea of being in the classroom, live online courses offer similar benefits to being in-person, with the flexibility of being able to learn from the comfort of your own home or office. You can use the Noble Desktop Classes Near Me tool to find live online InDesign courses or InDesign classes near you. The Classes Near Me tool is an easy way to see available training courses from reputable training programs in a specific subject area.