Any warnings against producing my magazines in Illustrator?

[Chris P. Bacon]

Apart from the lack of the grid system (which I abandoned, I am going to paint my layout in Illustrator) what can InDesign in terms of magazine production, that Illustrator can't?

[Brad @ Roaring Mouse]

InDesign is a page layout program, Illustrator is not. Although you could theoretically produce magazine pages that way, it is NOT designed to be a page layout program. InDesign is the right app, and is one of the industry standards.

[Barb Binder]

Hi Chris:

I think there's a gray area when it comes to designing flyers and business cards and postcards in InDesign vs Illustrator. One can pick the application they feel most comfortable with and be successful.

But for laying out any multi-page document like a newsletter, magazine, book, I think it would be a mistake. Illustrator doesn't support master pages, running heads, or automatic page numbers. It has a limited set of InDesign's typography controls. The text styles are somewhat unpredictable and clunky. The text frame options aren't as robust. No nested styles. No GREP styles. No tables. No tab stops. No table of contents generation.

It's great for illustration, though. 

~Barb

[Sumo148]

InDesign's purpose is page layout. While Illustrator shares a lot of similarities, it's primarily a vector graphic editor. For best practices you'd import your linked assets from Photoshop & Illustrator into InDesign for page layout. See Adobe's article here on InDesign vs Illustrator use cases.

InDesign has a lot of powerful tools that will aid you in page layout such as parent pages, paragraph styles, character styles, and object styles just to name a few. For long formatted documents such as magazines, it's best to efficiently set up your document so that any changes down the line can be updated automatically across the entire file. InDesign will give you the tools to do so, saving you time and keeping your file consistent.

[Robert Tkaczyk]

Illustrator is for vectors, Photoshop is for bitmaps - InDesign is for bringing it together surrounded by text.

[Eugene Tyson]

In my opinion Illustrator should not be used for page layout for anything other than simple flyers/banners/etc. 

InDesign is the page layout tool and has far more typographical features, page management, parent pages (formerly master pages), running heads, automatic page numbers, footnotes, endnotes, etc. 

Illustrator has very little or none of these long document features. 

If you find Illustrator easier to use, by all means create a layout there - but try to recreate that created design in InDesign.

Good luck

[Chris P. Bacon]

Page layout can be hand painted using brushes, in Illustrator, because once you drop the grid, you don't have anymore the requirement of "order".

[Chris P. Bacon]

Is Illustrator able to justify text with the same effectivity as InDesign? Especially full justification with no distortions. I already found my prefect recipe for that in the settings in InDesign, can I import it into Illustrator?

[rob day]

Is Illustrator able to justify text with the same effectivity as InDesign?

It has the same justification settings, but maybe the question should be what are you doing in Illustrator that can’t be done in InDesign?

[Chris P. Bacon]

Brushes, shape manipulation and masking are what I need, maybe 3D simulation would also be useful for graphics.

InDesign cannot do that.

Great, if it has the same justification capability as InDesign, I will work with Illustrator instead.

[Sumo148]

Do all your vector graphic manipulation in Illustrator, then import the AI file(s) into your InDesign document for typesetting and page layout of other assets. That's the best way to go about it. Use the correct tool for the job in combination with each other.

[Chris P. Bacon]

I see, but the text is a constantly evolving thing, much more than the graphics, and I need to adjust the graphics behind the text to the text, not the other way around. So when I click "edit original" to edit the graphics, I will only see the graphics in Illustrator, it would be difficult to adjust it to the text, if I only see the graphics. Because the text is what will mostly keep changing in its lenght.

Otherwise I will have to stick with predefined fixed lenght text. 

[Chris P. Bacon]

I dropped the grid layout. That's why I am moving to Illustrator.

My layout will be painted instead, individually for each page.

[Chris P. Bacon]

The idea is: text on graphics background. Very much like a comic book. But with a little more text: infographic documantaries and research writing in a scrapbook layout.

[rob day]

The idea is: text on graphics background.

Normally the workflow would be to create artwork that can’t be done in pagelayout either in Illustrator or Photoshop and place those files, then handle the pagination and typesetting in ID. You’re not going to have problems typesetting in Illustrator, but you could have production and efficiency problems when you need to deliver a press ready PDF.

[Chris P. Bacon]

Imagine a graphical Wikipedia, that's my genre.

[Chris P. Bacon]

But it will be serious research writing (not entertainment) like Wikipedia, without the academic bloat and obscurantism + heavily graphical.

[Chris P. Bacon]

I can't really do spread wide images because I mostly work with not copyrighted images (just like Wikipedia) and they don't have a very high resolution, but in Illustrator I can do spread-wide graphics instead, and I can put the images in them with blend modes. I work with distilled information (both images and text), and that's not copyrighted, like Wikipedia.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I can't make the slightest sense out of this; if images work in one app/layout, they should work almost identically in the other.

But best of luck on your latest endeavor.

[Chris P. Bacon]

It's like a magazine, but with more graphics, and no grid layout, instead: an infographic scrapbook layout, but comes out in series like a magazine. In fact the genre is mook, not magazine, because only the format is magazine, the content is book content, because every issue will be on a different and unrelated topic, they are popular in Japan, mook (magazine / book).

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

I doubt there is a single publication of any kind that is not produced in a page/text oriented application like InDesign or Word, with a very few legacy ones still using older tools like Quark and a few using proprietary/newspaper-oriented platforms.

That you can produce something like page layouts in nearly any desktop tool — I used to know people who did their correspondence and newsletters in Excel! — is not any argument for doing so.

By attempting to do publications in a tool that is not fundamentally page-oriented and definitely not multiple-page oriented, you're taking all the general problems of producing a publication, then trying to do it all with with one hand tied behind your back, and with half the features you will routinely need — doing it without integrated support for things as simple as page numbering, TOC, indexes, footnotes or anything else most publications require.

You can do page layouts as artistically elaborate as you like in Illustrator, but by not stopping there, pulling those layouts into InDesign and using the latter's "publication" abilities for everything related to text and organization, you might as well be hand-cutting linoleum mats for your pages.

[Chris P. Bacon]

The issue is not that I am not willing to bother to import them in Illustrator, but that once imported, they cannot be changed within InDesign. 

But they can be changed in Illustrator if I place them as linked, and that is suitable, perhaps.

For example if I place the graphical part of every page as .ai file into InDesign, then I can make the changes to that .ai with "edit original" (hopefully) in Illustrator, and then adjust the text to the changes in InDesign.

Problem is that the change most likely will happen in the text. Because the text is a constantly evolving something until the the point when you send it to print.

And the text need to be fitted to the graphics.

When I click edit original, I only see the graphics.

But I have to adjust the graphics to the changed text, not the other way around, because it's the text that will change first, and the graphics will need to be adjusted.

So that's a problem.

[Abambo]

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@James Gifford—NitroPress wrote:

I doubt there is a single publication of any kind that is not produced in a page/text oriented application like InDesign or Word, with a very few legacy ones still using older tools like Quark and a few using proprietary/newspaper-oriented platforms.

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Quark is probably still used a lot in the industry. I know nobody with serious ambitions, doing his publication in Word (except that proceedings on conferences are very often typeset in Word). Word doesn't even do correct colour separation.

We also typeset our contracts and technical documentations in Word (big industrial projects). More than once, I had to rescue the documents from misbehaving. I would not recommend anyone using Word for more than letter typing and simple reports. 

I've once done our healt and safety guide in Word, as the initial requirement was that the H&S guys should update the guide independantly. What happened, was that the ducument always returned to us, because they had messed it up. They couldn't even do the ToC properly. 

I really love Word for typing my letters, but that's it.

I can imagine someone doing a mag in Illustrator, I wouldn't however do it, for multiple reasons, laid out here.

[James Gifford—NitroPress]

Word is not uncommon in the textbook industry, because it can go natively from author to editor to page designer to proofing and back around. I've edited more than a few textbook chapters set up in Word, as elaborately as you might see in ID, with chapter page graphics and bleed flags and text decoration. It seems to work for them. Most are not particularly worried about accurate color separations, or take care of that at another level.

But then, I've also taken on some horrendous messes representing years of work in Word that in the end was absolutely useless in getting it to publication. 🙂

Stripped and configured, I don't know of a better writing tool. But you have to chisel off the marketing-driven setup and options and turn off most of the "helpful" crap. There used to be whole books on how to do this, for all the Office apps.

The rest of this thread is... characteristic in all ways. 'Nuf sed.

[chrisg11235813]

Phew!

For a second there, I thought I was on the Word Support Community forum.