What Adobe Product Should I Use To Make A Glossy Report?

June 5, 2013 12:09 PM

I am making a 20 page glossy (i.e. lots of graphics and photos) report. Previously, I have been using Illustrator to make individual pages, but that is clearly not the correct tool. What product (preferable Adobe) should I get to create this kind of document?
posted by chrisalbon to Work & Money (12 answers total)

Adobe InDesign would be my first pick.
posted by Juniper Toast at 12:12 PM on June 5, 2013 [4 favorites]

Definitely Adobe InDesign, and your familiarity with Illustrator will make it pretty easy to pick up.
posted by dayintoday at 12:14 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

Nthing Adobe InDesign. I use both Illustrator and InDesign in (part of) my work. What's nice about using both those Adobe tools is that you can very easily transfer graphics from Illustrator into InDesign and have them scale nicely, print smoothly, etc.
posted by aecorwin at 12:17 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

InDesign.
posted by Faint of Butt at 12:17 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

Nthing InDesign, but you'll want to combine it with Illustrator and Photoshop for the graphics and photos.
posted by sonic meat machine at 12:17 PM on June 5, 2013 [1 favorite]

To give you a really good idea of what InDesign can do (and how to do it, especially with an Illustrator background), right now CreativeLive are rebroadasting a one day free InDesign class with Khara Plicanic (you can purchase the downloadable videos if you find it useful). I think it'll be repeated again this week, best keep an eye on the schedule.
posted by humph at 12:19 PM on June 5, 2013

InDesign is purpose-built for this sort of thing.
That said, I've also done multi-page documents like this in Illustrator, as well, with fantastic results. In some ways, I find Illy easier to use, but that's probably because I've been using it since the Earth cooled.
posted by Thorzdad at 12:21 PM on June 5, 2013

You can make multi-page documents in Illustrator, they do have a text threading feature (use multiple artboards) and a few other bells and whistles like text wrap, but I would only do that if you don't have Indesign. Indesign is one of the easiest programs to learn, I LOVE it. Lynda.com has some really good tutorials for the program.
posted by nanook at 12:35 PM on June 5, 2013

Likely not useful answer to your current question as I suspect you don't have the budget for new software...

But my suggestion would be CorelDraw*. It's competent or better at most things relating to making pretty documents.

* This has actually been my answer to this question for nearly 20 years.
posted by fief at 2:24 PM on June 5, 2013

InDesign. Illustrator wouldn't be bad for making it, but really you're pushing it and it's going to push back. InDesign will not only go where you want to go, it will lead you.
posted by Brainy at 5:05 PM on June 5, 2013

If you're giving it to someone else to print (Kinkos, local printer, etc.) then InDesign is your choice, and here's why: it will collect ALL fonts and graphics used in the publication on one discreet place so you can, in turn, give them all to whoever is actually doing the printing. Illustrator can outline fonts and embed graphics, but these are both irreversible. InDesign's method makes correcting on-the-fly, hot-swapping and re-linking so much easier.
posted by lekvar at 6:41 PM on June 5, 2013

InDesign will also allow you to produce bleeds and crop marks and export PDFs.

Also if you expect to do a lot of similar work, any time you spend learning InDesign's more advanced features, especially when it comes to styles (GREP styles OMG) will repay you many times over in saved annoyance.

Also make sure you take advantage of the document grid and set your styles up to align to it. (Your grid spacing should be the same as the leading on your primary body copy style.)
posted by oblique red at 9:22 AM on June 6, 2013