Using Adobe Creative Suite for Album Design

InDesign for Design
InDesign for Design 1
with contributions from:
Tom Lee
Mark Ashworth
Kirsty Ashworth
Chris Morris
Jane Briscoe-Price

We have been prowling around this conundrum for quite some time, indeed we have written on the subject every now and then. Most people who design their own wedding albums do so using either Photoshop or some form of utility program associated with their processing laboratory. The popularity of this approach is testament to its success; it is certainly a straightforward way to design an album.

The conundrum, though, is this. If Photoshop is a good page design tool how come nobody uses it to design magazines? The answer is obvious if you think about it – text. There is so much to handle in a magazine that page layout programs such as InDesign and QuarkXpress are largely dedicated to controlling text placement, running it around pictures, arranging pictures on the page and finally getting the whole thing onto a press in an orderly manner. But what else is Creative Suite good at and how does this impinge on album design, with their relatively sparse text content? Well fashions come and go but as far as design is concerned there is an indication of increased usage of vector art mixed in with pixel-based imagery. If you don't believe us take a look back through the last couple of months of competition entries (there – we do look at them now and again!).

Although you can use vector shapes within Photoshop you cannot manipulate them as easily as you can in Illustrator and this is the key to the argument we are following. Illustrator brings with it the functionality of Live Colour (more on that later) along with the ability to transfer vector shapes, via the clipboard directly into either InDesign or Photoshop.

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