What it is
InDesign is Adobe's desktop publishing application. It is built for laying out pages: brochures, books, magazines, reports, forms and anything else where text and images have to sit together on a grid and go to a printer. It handles master pages, paragraph and character styles, long documents and multi-page spreads.
It replaced Adobe PageMaker as Adobe's layout tool and became the standard in print shops and publishing. It exports print-ready PDF with bleeds, crop marks and colour profiles, and it can also produce interactive PDFs and EPUB e-books. Graphics placed from Photoshop and Illustrator stay linked, so updates flow through.
How I use it
- At Marsh Canada, an insurance brokerage, from 2006 to 2007, designed custom cover pages for insurance documents in InDesign and Corel Draw.
- Print production for many clients through my independent contracts since 1995.
- Content, design and delivery for print and presentation at Metal Mountain Resources, alongside the application work.
- Graphic design for print, part of the in-house visual side of my work.
InDesign is the right tool for anything with pages: a brochure, a cover sheet, a price list, a printed report. I reach for it when a document has to look consistent across many pages and arrive at the printer ready to run, which is something a word processor does badly.
Questions
Has Shawn Mervin done print design professionally?
Yes. At Marsh Canada he designed custom cover pages for insurance documents in InDesign and Corel Draw, and print production has been part of his independent contracts since 1995.
Can you turn our Word documents and price lists into a proper printed piece?
Yes. That is what page layout software is for. The content you already have goes into InDesign, gets a consistent layout, and comes out as a print-ready PDF.