Adobe InDesign versus Affinity Publisher

[Applause] welcome to design domination where you'll learn to become a better more business savvy designer so you can dominate your competition hi and thanks for tuning in i'm colleen grotzer and in this episode of design domination i'm gonna compare adobe indesign and affinity publisher so stick around to find out some of the key differences and if any of them are a deal breaker for you and then which one program you should use now as a graphic designer you might be wondering the pros and cons of adobe design in adobe indesign and affinity publisher and if one is better than the other designers seem to be on one team or the other like nothing in between you might also be asking should i switch from adobe indesign to affinity publisher and i'll answer that too now the versions that i'm going to compare are adobe indesign 2021 and affinity publisher 1.9.3 both are for page layout so they can handle anything from a one-page poster design to large books and reports and both are available for mac and windows now generally speaking the programs are very similar to one another but there might be some key features that will be the deciding factor for you depending on the type of work that you do now when it comes to trying out the software both offer free trials you can try affinity publisher free for 30 days but with indesign it's only seven days i'd say indesign has more of a learning curve to it and that's not a lot of time to try it out what's helpful though is that there's a lot of tutorials and courses support forums and facebook groups for both of them online so it should be easy to get any questions that you might have answered now let's look at pricing this is where the two really separate themselves adobe indesign is only available through subscription-based pricing and that's a huge turn-off to many designers others love it though because they can always get the latest version of the software affinity publisher is a one-time low fee that cannot be beat it costs only about 75 usd right now and so do their designer and photo programs which are similar to adobe illustrator and photoshop now if you subscribe to only indesign with adobe's creative cloud subscription that's about twenty one dollars usd per month if you're also using photoshop in illustrator you're gonna pay about fifty three dollars a month now many designers who use affinity publisher switch from indesign and if you're already using indesign i think you'll find the transition pretty smooth for what it's worth most of my career has been spent in publication design and layout i worked in quarkxpress back in the day version 4.11 i loved it i went kicking and screaming into indesign when it came out when my place of work forced me to and i've been using indesign since i didn't actually use affinity publisher until i created my brand style guide builder in multiple formats i created it first in indesign and then i opened it in affinity publisher modified some of the setup to take advantage of publishers built-in features you know where i could do so and then saved it as a publisher file i picked it up pretty quickly because i found it really similar to use to indesign the interface is not that different from indesign either i found the master pages and the layers work a little bit differently though from indesign and those confused me for a minute but if you don't already work in indesign well that point is mood and both programs share a ton of similar features but affinity publisher uses different terminology for some of its features and i'll get into a few of those in a bit so let's talk compatibility when it comes to opening indesign files because this will be something that you've got to think about if you want to switch completely from indesign or if you ever need to update an indesign document that you created in the past well first off you can't open the native indesign format the intd file in affinity publisher right out of the box you'll need to use id marks by markzware the same company that created the converter for quarkxpress to indesign files 20 some years ago with affinity publisher 1.8 or later though you can open indesign's idml format now you could also open a pdf all or just certain pages and opening a pdf is different from placing a pdf which acts like it does in indesign but opening a pdf will create a new document with the individual editable pages and it's super awesome but there are a few caveats with it and one is that any hyphenated words in the pdf will have those as manually inserted hyphens and that means if you reflow any text the hyphens will remain so you've got to go in and remove them now the same thing happens whenever you copy and paste text from any pdf to another program another caveat with this method is that there won't be any master pages or paragraph styles in the file now with some files i experimented with opening a pdf didn't require any tweaking for the visual look of it but opening the idml file did require some adjustments both programs integrate with their own suite of drawing and photo editing programs now affinity publisher has a feature called studio link and that allows you to use affinity photo and affinity designer from within publisher this is very different from adobe indesign where you have to edit images separately in illustrator or photoshop and have to wait several minutes for them to even open and that drives me nuts affinity studio link allows you to work on the images from within publisher while accessing the actual program features from there it's really cool and a lot of designers really love this feature paragraph styles are another feature and these actually work similarly in both programs but they're called different things in publisher the paragraph styles panel is called text styles and it shows the styles as they actually look it also includes both the paragraph and the character styles in one panel and gives you the option to show any overrides on the style that has been applied as part of its paragraph style features indesign has what's called nested styles where you can set up one or more character styles to be applied to parts of a paragraph automatically and publisher has something similar but they call it initial words and that lets you set up one character style to be applied to a predetermined number of words or up to a certain type of dash or space or character of your choosing and there's also keep options like in indesign but they're called flow in affinity publisher another feature is placeholder text both programs will give you placeholder text indesign calls it placeholder text publisher calls it filler text now what i like about publisher's filler text is that it's dynamic so when you adjust the size of the text frame the text is automatically removed or added depending on whether you make the frame smaller or larger the other thing is that in publisher the filler text gets treated like one unit there's no selecting it at the paragraph or character level in other words and then in indesign you can select any part of that and you can remove words and you can break it into more paragraphs you can copy it etc footnotes and endnotes are another thing to consider these can be done in indesign with a built-in feature but they cannot be done in publisher in this way if you don't work with documents that have any then this won't be an issue if you do need them though the workaround is to add them manually now in a large document with a lot of footnotes or endnotes especially if they need to be clickable this could be extremely time consuming when it comes to creating and editing tables publisher makes this easy by giving you options right there on the page when you click inside a table and it gives you an easy way to add more rows or columns you can do this easily in indesign if you use shortcuts when it comes to creating a table of contents i know how much designers avoid using an automated table of contents with their documents and they'll do it manually and this is probably because indesign gives you so many options and it can be overwhelming at first to create an automated table of contents so if you fall into that camp you'll appreciate that affinity publisher makes it much easier to do you literally just place your text cursor where you want the table of contents to appear and then go to the text menu and table of contents and then insert table of contents and then you can select from a list which styles to include in the table of contents and which ones you want to include page numbers for because you might not want to include page numbers for all of them like headings of sections for example and this is actually much easier than scrolling through a long list of paragraph styles in indesign and then adding them one by one and then going to each style individually and modifying what you want to include and like with indesign you can also have multiple tables of contents in your document when it comes to interactivity indesign offers more options and you can embed multimedia files in indesign you can create hyperlinks and bookmarks and even build forms an offender in affinity publisher on the other hand you're limited to hyperlinks and bookmarks and in terms of accessibility unfortunately this is not possible with affinity publisher it does not allow you to export to a tagged pdf and that is the basis for an accessible pdf so that makes it a deal breaker for any accessible document work adobe indesign on the other hand does allow this and helps you get most of the way there with accessibility some work still must be done in the pdf saving the document's history is an interesting feature that affinity publisher offers which indesign does not in affinity publisher you can save the document's history with the document if you choose if you do though you have to keep in mind that if you send the file to someone else they will be able to see the steps that you took in creating and editing that document and that may or may not be what you want to do you know that could be a good thing though if you wanted to train a client or a co-worker how to do something or if you wanted to know if you already did something in particular in that file now keep in mind using this feature can add to the file size so if you change your mind after turning that feature on you can just uncheck it in the file menu and save the document again okay so there you have it a breakdown of some of the pros and cons of adobe indesign and affinity publisher if you're looking for a budget-friendly page layout program and you don't need some of the features of adobe indesign that affinity publisher doesn't have well then affinity publisher makes a lot of sense but if you design and layout complex publications or do any accessibility work like i do then adobe indesign is the clear winner but it also doesn't have to be one or the other you know it would be totally feasible to use affinity publisher most of the time and then use indesign here and there only when you need those additional features for a particular project you'll still save a ton of money paying for affinity publisher one time and then paying as you need for indesign so tell me which one are you using and which did you switch and which one do you prefer are you looking to gain confidence clarity and a competitive edge in a crowded marketplace i offer mentoring resources digital products and courses including accessibility for designers and web developers that will empower you to be the design hero not another order taker find them at creativedashboost.com and come and connect with me and other design dominators in the design domination facebook group

Channel: Design Domination

Views: 962

Keywords: affinity vs adobe, affinity versus adobe, adobe indesign alternative, affinity publisher vs indesign, publisher vs indesign, indesign vs publisher, adobe indesign versus publisher, adobe indesign, affinity publisher review, affinity adobe alternative, indesign alternatives, how to use affinity publisher, affinity publisher, graphic design software, adobe indesign vs affinity publisher, switch from indesign, indesign publisher comparison, affinity indesign alternative

Id: 7-I_cuTew9E

Length: 12min 35sec (755 seconds)

Published: Thu Oct 07 2021