Creative — Sweet!

Adobe has announced their new Creative Suite and Creative Suite Premium application collections for designers. In Spring 2002, Applelust took a couple of looks at InDesign 2.0 (reviews for professional and non-professional designers), and decided we liked what we saw. Sometime between now and the Winter holidays, InDesign CS is going to hit the street - and once again Adobe has pumped up this application with a new feature set that will make even the most stoic of graphic designers drool.

Rather than showcase all the cool new stuff in the entire Creative Suite - I'm going to examine a few features that literally elicited a series of "oohs" and "aah's" when I recently got a peek at InDesign CS. These are the features that the Quark holdouts and diehards might really want to examine before investing in the latest Quark update...

Bleed and Slugs

I'll start off with Document Setup. I'll admit, I had a few pet-peeves with InDesign 2.0 when it came to working with bleeds. I had to always remember to setup bleeds in both the Print dialog and during PDF Export, and I'm not always paying a lot of attention when zipping a quick proof on the LaserJet.

Screenshot - bleed and slug setup

InDesign CS lets you specify bleed and slug settings right inside either the Document Setup or the New Document windows (slugs are often used as a "note space" just outside document boundaries). These settings then carry through the rest of the document settings - becoming the default in both the Print and PDF Export screens. Still not impressed? Well, you can also preview bleed and slugs directly in InDesign - without printing proofs.

Separations Preview

To be completely honest - I'm thrilled about this feature both as a designer and a educator. I'm always looking for new ways to explain color separations and offset printing to students - and the separations preview is going to help tremendously. From a design point-of-view, it's also going to save me a lot of color toner.

screenshot - separations preview

The Separations Preview palette lets you take a peek at how CMYK and Pantone colors are interacting (and hopefully behaving) in your layout. You can also check overprinting and set ink limits - or use the palette to compare the look of using black as opposed to a rich black.

This is also going to come in handy to preview how your mixed inks are working. InDesign CS is also capable of creating new color swatches that combine CMYK and spot inks. Personally, I can't wait to play with the Separation Preview palette to see how it handles a 6 color poster I'm working on that combines CMYK with one spot and a spot varnish. With the ability to check all this onscreen, I'm definitely looking forward to spending less money on color proofs.

Flattener Preview

I admit, when I really started using InDesign 2.0, I was a little wary of using transparency in any of my layouts. Not knowing exactly how files were going to print - well, I got a little gun shy. I'm pretty confident about using transparency when it comes to printing directly from InDesign, but on some occasions in PDFs, transparent vectors seemed to, well, freak out a bit. Actually, they appeared to rasterize, but not always in a way I expected.

screenshot - flattener preview

I'm not even going to pretend to know how all this works (flattening transparent areas for printing) - and now I don't really need to know it - I can check layouts in the Flattener Preview. You can apply Flattener presets to your layout to see what happens to your text and graphics, and then apply the Flattener preset you select to your final printing settings to ensure expected results. You can also highlight certain objects or combinations of objects in your layout to tweak for the best results. The red area in the image above show affected areas, while the gray area shows areas that are not flattened. Once again - you can tweak your layout to ensure the highest quality without constantly printing proofs.

Package for GoLive

Are you one of those folks that have held off on committing yourself to interactive design? Don't be shy - I know a ton of print designers that are either a little intimidated by learning the basics of Web layout, or much more commonly - just WAY too short on time to pick up a WYSIWYG editor and learn the ropes.

I have to admit, my internal jury is not yet in on the Package for GoLive feature - but I'm definitely intrigued by the concept.

screenshot - package for GoLive

One of the HUGE features of the entire Creative Suite is the collaborative nature of all the applications. Granted, some of this collaboration existed in an initial form in Photoshop 7, Illustrator 10 and InDesign 2 - but one of the biggest selling points of the Creative Suite is highly polished collaboration between applications. More on that later.

InDesign CS throws a new curve into this collaboration - allowing you to easily send assets such as images, text and to some degree styles into GoLive right from your InDesign document. It's quick and easy to place images in a web layout, and the applications handle the conversion from CMYK or spot colors into RGB formats.

I'll admit to being a Dreamweaver guy, but I'll be taking a good hard look at GoLive for this very feature - both for myself and for the online edition of the University newspaper.

Photoshop Spot Color Support

Speaking of collaboration - I've been a tremendous fan of InDesign's ability to place native Photoshop and Illustrator files. I'm not really a big fan of having to create a bunch of TIFs and EPS files - and then keep track of everything through several revision stages. I never can remember what I've updated, so I end up repeating a lot of work.

The one exception to this new rule - I still had to create EPS or DCS files for Photoshop files with duotones or spot channels. Once again, I was not thrilled, and this was my number one pet peeve with InDesign.

screenshot - duotones

I got a chance to speak with some nice folks from Adobe not too long ago about InDesign CS - and the number one question on my pad was whether or not InDesign CS was going to support native Photoshop files with spot colors. I thought I was being sly - coming up with a really good question - but they rolled this feature out pretty quickly in the conference call. I was bummed about getting my one good question blown for about a nanosecond.

I'm totally stoked for this feature, and I imagine my design students, who also don't miss creating TIFs, are also going to be quite happy.

Typographical Control

The reason I adopted InDesign and never looked back was it's stunningly simple, yet complex typographical controls. In a nutshell, it's as complex as you want it to get - but easy to pick up quickly.

Adobe's Paragraph Composer is the greatest thing to happen to print design since the invention of movable type. All hyperbole aside, the Paragraph Composer really is quite remarkable and used in combination with Paragraph Styles usually results in gorgeous orphan and widow free copy right out of the box. Granted it always worked beautifully with justified type - and the benefits for ragged type was considerably less noticeable.

screenshot - paragraph composer

Well, that Paragraph formatting is all grown up now as InDesign CS can now balance ragged lines as well. I'm quite anxious to see this in action not only in headlines - but also across entire paragraphs. I've never been a huge fan of ragged alignment, simply because it's such a pain to make it look good. Line by line quadding to balance the rag is not my idea of a good time. Once again, Adobe has taken a serious step toward making excellent typographical easier for both advanced and beginner level designers.

But Wait, That's Not All...

There are plenty of other new features in InDesign CS, such as the sweet little Control and Info palettes, running headers and footers, user-specified glyph sets, PDF/X file support and quite a few other worthwhile additions. We'll be taking a closer look at some of those features in out full review of InDesign sometime in the near future.

In the meantime, some of you considering spending about a thousand bucks on a new copy of Quark to be able to work in OS X might want to wait a little while - InDesign CS is second-generation OS X software and will benefit from Adobe's development experience.

On of the biggest new enhancements in InDesign? A 40-80% application performance increase for those who have been using InDesign 2. Needless to say, the new Adobe Creative Suite sounds, well, sweet.

- Joel Davies

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