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Graphic Design essentials and why we use Illustrator, Indesign & Photoshop

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photoshop vs illustratorillustrator vs indesign

Illustrator, Indesign and Photoshop. Let us jump right in, shall we. Why not start with the basics?
So what is the difference between all three?

Let’s start with Adobe Illustrator. Adobe Illustrator is a software app for creating drawings, illustrations, and artwork using Windows or MacOS Computers. Adobe Illustrator is widely and best known by those who are in graphic design but not limited to those in graphic design. It is used across a multitude of different professions, mainly all focused about the arts. People such as Web Developers/Designers, visual artists and highly professional illustrators around the world who create quality artwork. Illustrator has one of the most sophisticated drawing tools.

How could you use it?

Adobe Illustrator is used for so many different things but mainly to create a variety of digital and print images. Cartoons, charts, diagrams, logos, graphs and general illustrations are just some of the things that you can create within the Illustrator application. Your ability to import photos and use it as a guide to trace and or change is endless, it can be used to change colours, create a sketch-like image, the possibilities are absolutely infinite.
Adobe Illustrator has the ability to place text around curves, this is especially useful for artists creating logos. Illustrator is also used heavily in designing mock-ups which show what the website will look like when it’s completed, and creating icons used within apps or websites.

One of Adobe Illustrators most important features we feel is the quality of artwork created by using Illustrator is the vector based artwork. Illustrator also features a quality that is independent of the resolution at which it is displayed. This means that an image that is created in illustrator can be stretched out or reduced significantly without diminishing any of the image quality. By creating and using vector based artwork, you are able to create something as small as a stamp or as large as a freeway billboard.

Comparing Illustrator to the other platforms is hard, although they can all do similar things, individually they have their special ability.
Now that we have briefly touched on Illustrator, let’s head over to Adobe photoshop and look at that.

Adobe Photoshop is an imaging and graphic design platform that can be used for many different things and for many different reasons all around the world. Photoshop can be used for designing websites, videos editing, editing photos and creating 3D work. Photoshop is a really useful tool when creating basically anything.
Photoshop is an Adobe application that obviously integrates well with Illustrator making things fairly easy and simple to use once you get the hang of it.
Although Adobe Photoshop is compatible with Illustrator, Photoshop is a raster (Raster image is built out of a set number of pixels and will change the quality when resized) image based photo editing platform and thus basically making Photoshop only good at photoshopping, creating animations like GIFS and layering photos.
It is still a key component to a graphic design job but if we were based solely on Photoshop, we most likely would not get too far.

Let’s take a step away from Adobe now and take a look at Indesign. Idesign is a desktop publishing application and it’s primarily used to do layouts, such as newspaper, magazines books, posters flyers or in our case we use it for Instagram layouts. Indesign really kicks everything up a notch, it is great because it is fairly text heavy but allows you to really hit the nail on the head when it comes to mastering page templates. Page designs are instantly unified throughout the entire document, pages are automatically numbered and can easily be repositioned and duplicated. Simply, if what you are creating has text, Indesign can handle it.

Really glad I could touch on all of those things really briefly, because being in graphic design you need to know your way around. WIth years of experience, you learn the hard way how to do things sometimes. So why are Illustrator, Photoshop and Indesign essential to graphic design?

As clearly depicted across all three explanations, not one thing can do it all three. They all are special in their unique way, but all are needed to complete a job. From start to finish no matter what order you need them to be in, they all carry different pieces of the puzzle.

As a web development and design based agency, we heavily lean on all three products to get our jobs done. From Logo design, vector images that can be resized to letterheads, sprawled across websites, to photoshopping images to fit on websites and indesign to web and social media layouts, If you are looking for an agency who has background knowledge and a lot of it to complete a website design or development, AX Digital have 15 years worth of premium experience.

We work on anything from style guides to complete re brands. Send us an email or get in touch via phone, we would love to take on any job you have in mind.

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