DIY design 4 - toolbox: page layout software
7 April 2008 Jeff Gill
You have a computer. What software do you put on it?
Everything that you make, except for websites, is going to end up on a page. (Of course, that ‘page’ may be a bulletin, poster, sign, business card, booklet or PDF.) If you are going to build a page, you need page layout software. For decent page layout there are only 2.5 choices.
This is the industry standard. It is a package of software that includes InDesign for page layout, Photoshop for image editing and Illustrator for vector graphics. You can also get versions that include web design software. Creative Suite is what most world-famous designers use. Get this, and you can ignore most of the rest of my software posts.
Adobe CS also has two distinct disadvantages.
The first is the learning curve; it’s steep. There is no opening a new InDesign document and just typing. It takes real commitment to understand how to use this software. And even if you want to put the time in, you need to consider the potential for sharing and collaboration. If you go on holiday, will there be someone else who do the design work?
The second is price. Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Standard will set you back £1051.62. You don’t have to pay that much. You can find legal versions on eBay for less. You can get an older version (CS2 or CS) on eBay for much less. I wouldn’t recommend an old version for a new Mac though. You will experience a significant lag in performance. CS3 is the only version built for Intel Macs. Having said that, I’m still using InDesign 2, which is 3 versions old.
If Adobe Creative Suite appeals to you, download a fully functional trial and have a play.
This is a suite of work software that includes Pages. Pages is a two-sided program, one for word processing, one for page layout. The page layout side is actually quite good. I’m doing most things for my church on Pages now. The reason is the church is growing and my job is evolving. In the future, I want someone else to be quickly able to take up the design work when I’m not available. I want my work to be able to be used and modified by others in the church.
Pages isn’t as good as InDesign. It lacks the thousandth-of-a-millimetre precision of InDesign, but it is good enough to do what I need it to. Also, and this is important for cross-platform sharing, Pages opens Word documents and exports very good Word documents and PDFs.
I haven’t used MS Office products for years, so I went to the Office website to catch up on what they are up to these days. I found webpages that would never finish loading, a link to watch a video that gives a ‘page not found’ error, and this new feature (scroll to the bottom): Microsoft Office Diagnostics is a series of diagnostic tests that can help you to discover why your computer is crashing.
Insert your own cheap shot here.
I’m sure that you can make Word or Publisher do anything that Pages can do. I know that having pretty tools doesn’t make you a better designer. I also know that working in an ugly, crashy environment is a hindrance to creativity.
Download Office product trials here.
Other options
The first alternative option is open source. There is a decent amount of good open source software. The most well known is my favourite browser Firefox. The open source page layout program is Scribus. It seems to be able to do a lot of stuff well. I was going to install it and try it until I read the installation instructions for Mac. I don’t get excited about phrases like, If everything goes well…
That’s the thing with most open source programs: they may be free, but they are not without cost. They take a definite time commitment. You need to decide what is the best value for you, spending money on trusted software or spendiing time with an open source project.
The next 352 alternative options are the other page layout/desktop publishing programs out there that come with 158,000 ‘free quality clip art images’. Leave them alone. They are not your friends.
Two final notes
QuarkXPress – you think Adobe’s learning curve is steep?
CorelDRAW – NO.
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tags: design
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