nevermind, the text looks terrible

• ering
• June 23rd, 2008
• 04:08:51 PM

So, I was thinking I was so awesome exporting a pdf from InDesign and importing into Photoshop to get a png with pixel-perfect accuracy (a one-pixel line actually shows up as a one-pixel line!), but of course turning off anti-aliasing makes the text chunky and sucky. Anyway……………

At the beginning of the week, I made a huge decision: I switched from designing the project in Illustrator to InDesign. O M G. I did some very in-depth research (read: 3 minute Google search) into what designers are using to layout pages, but didn’t really find any solid blog posts or information.

I was brought up as a print designer. Though my experience with InDesign is in no way limited, using it for the purpose of designing for web is a new and somewhat odd prospect. In my opinion, InDesign is first, a print design tool. Yes it has XML exports, yes it has exports for Dreamweaver. So, whatever, I don’t know where I’m going with this.

Here’s some things I like better in InDesign:

Pages. Websites have pages, not layers. InDesign has pages, not just layers.
Master pages. These are great for things like headers and footers, elements that appear on multiple pages in the same place.
Selecting text and object. When you select a text box and an object to resize, by default, only the text frame but not the text resizes. This is really useful for making, say, a line and a text frame 300 pixels wide without stretching out the text.
Align to baseline grid. Not that I love using it, since I like having control of every pixel, but if I wanted to limit my self to a 14px baseline, the option is there.
Export as multi-page pdf. I am almost positive you cannot export 10 Illustrator layers as a 10-page pdf.
Paragraph styles and character styles. If used properly and consistently, styles are very similar to css, which is super. Edit: Illustrator has this as well, but that doesn’t make how rad it is any less radical.

Things I like better in Illustrator:

Pixels. You can choose pixels as your units. The closest you get in InDesign is points. When it comes to font sizes, points and pixels are not exactly the same thing.
Hide Artboard. I haven’t found this feature in InDesign, probably because it is built for designing printed materials with actual edges. A piece of paper isn’t usually resizable by the user the way a browser is.
Command-H. This hides frame edges, points, etc. This way you can have something selected, move it around and preview how it looks without deselecting it. Does this exist in InDesign? I can’t find it.
In general Illustrator feels more delicate than InDesign. I don’t know if that makes any sense, but it’s a good thing to me.

I could go on, but I actually don’t really feel like it right now.

Depending on the style and size of the project, I would still consider using Photoshop or Illustrator in the future. But we’re talking the big-time here, so InDesign it is.