Design Software

MountainMonster

Evening all,

my wife is very creative, and we are looking at getting her some design software (publishing, documents, and logo creation), and have found Adobe Indesign CS5 which has caught our eye, but we are put off by the price. Anyone know of any fairly decently priced copies of InDesign, or if we should be looking at other similar programmes, which ones?

Thanks for the help in advance.

YeehaaMcgee

What specifically are you after? "Design software" encompasses such an incredibly wide range of "stuff" that it's impractical to suggest anything that might work.

YeehaaMcgee

Oh, remember, before you do splurge any money on expensive software thay may (or may not) be suitable - if you go to Adobe's download section, you can get trial versions of pretty much anything.

MountainMonster

Perfect, thanks for the tip!

We are looking mostly at document creation software, brochures, business cards, logos that sort of thing!

anj132

There is always GNU licenced software that might be worthwhile such as GIMP/Inkscape.

YeehaaMcgee

Not sure specifically what would fill that need - I used CorelDraw yuears and years and years ago, but that's prety much fallen by the wayside.
Something that may be of interest to you, if you can't find free software to do the job (I personally can't stand GIMP - it's horrendously slow, clunky, and lacks features that I need from photoshop - and I never managed to get inkscape running reliably. Your mileage may vary) - is that Adobe have just released a new subscription pricing model too. I believe it's $75 for a month, and that gets you the entire creative suite.
Might be a cost-effective way of doing things, depending how much business you intend to get.

sloppycowpat

ink is a free ware program it is like adobe illustrator which is good and corel draw used them all in my degree they are good

MountainMonster

Awesome many thanks guys! We tried GIMP out earlier, and it seems to be very basic, and very hard to figure out!

sloppycowpat

gimp is alright easier to just use loads of layers and modify each layer

pilch

MountainMonster wrote:

Perfect, thanks for the tip!

We are looking mostly at document creation software, brochures, business cards, logos that sort of thing!

Are you printing them yourself or sending to a printer?

If you are sending to a printer you will need to supply either the original docs with fonts & images or a print ready pdf, most commercial printers will be using Indesign or QuarkXpress - they are pretty much industry standard programmes for page layout.

If you really want to go to town get Adobe Creative suite, this will give you photo retouching and manipulation via Photoshop, vector (drawing) graphics editing/creation tools via Illustrator and Indesign to put it all together.

These are all powerful professional tools for the job, you can probably get away with using the other applications, but you may hit problems when you come to produce the work, especially if you are talking about brochures with multiple pages.

YeehaaMcgee

Showing my ignorance here, but I had no idea Quark was still a big hitter. I know it used to be to publishing, what Photoshop is to photo retouching back when I was in school though.

MountainMonster

Awesome thanks for the tips!

We ended up getting Adobe Creative Suite, and a few books to help learn the programmes, so see what we can do!

pilch

Nice one, there is loads of help online and the adobe help & tutorials are pretty good... the good thing about CS is that its pretty intuitive, once you get the hang of the basic principles the logic follows across all the apps.

Having said that, there's plenty to learn ;-)

@ yehaaa Quark is still pretty well up there, especially by the time served guys who cut their teeth on it, but there does seem to be a noticeable shift over the past few years to CS and Indesign, partly due to the reasons above I guess, but also due to additional features over quark.