Adobe CS6 Design Standard review

Tom Arah Read more May 11, 2012

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£1238

Price when reviewed

We’ve already taken an in-depth look at the improvements to Photoshop in CS6, so we were keen to see what changes have been made to the other two main elements of the Design Standard package.

InDesign CS6

Alongside Photoshop, the centrepiece of CS6 Design Standard is InDesign. It made its name through commercial print, but nowadays digital publishing is almost as important. InDesign’s PDF output – and the tie-in with Acrobat X Pro – remains a major strength for both paper and electronic delivery. New capabilities include the ability to preview and export greyscale PDFs (handy when reworking colour print) and create interactive PDF forms from scratch.

PDF capabilities remain key, but the future of publishing lies in app-based delivery to handheld devices. Here, InDesign provides integration with Adobe’s online Digital Publishing Suite (a separate purchase) through the ability to output publications as folio files. It’s a workflow that’s still finding its feet, but the ability to preview folios on the desktop as well as on devices is a big step forward.

Significantly, InDesign CS6 recognises that digital publishing requires designers to produce versions of a publication for different screen sizes. To tackle this paradigm shift, new “liquid page rules” let you specify how layouts adapt. Pages can be set to scale or re-centre to the new screen size and shape, or you can use guides or individually control how objects respond. Using the Page tool you can preview how liquid page layouts adapt to common screen sizes, provided as presets, or to any size simply by dragging on the page edge.

Liquid page rules are great, but for the key screen targets you’ll want full hands-on control. This can be achieved by creating dedicated alternative layouts – say, for the iPad, in both vertical and horizontal orientations. During creation you can link or unlink stories and styles and, once created, alternative layouts are handled as separate columns within the Pages panel.

Alternative layouts prove useful for traditional workflows too – say, for producing multiple sizes of an advert or simply for trying out multiple versions of a design (as QuarkXPress users have long known). To make such handling more efficient and also available between publications, InDesign CS6 provides Content Collector tools to pick up and place content, and a Content Conveyer panel where items can be held and linkage and styles controlled.

InDesign CS6 has something to offer all users, but it comes into its own for large publishing houses trying to tap into the digital market.

Illustrator CS6

Next up is Illustrator’s overhaul. To start there’s a rationalisation of the toolbox and panels, plus a darker, more modern interface (you can adjust the brightness). More importantly, Illustrator CS6 benefits from native 64-bit support and the same GPU-based Mercury Performance System as Photoshop. By taking advantage of all available RAM and offloading work to the GPU, responsiveness is better – especially when working with large complex files.

Illustrator’s bitmap tracing capabilities have been reworked. The former Live Trace system offered real power but was hidden away and underappreciated. Now the tracing engine has been updated, and everything is managed more efficiently through a new Image Trace panel.

New creative power comes with the ability to apply gradients to strokes. This might sound of only occasional interest – say, for producing rainbow effects – but you can apply gradients within and along strokes, which proves more useful. In particular, by using gradients to subtly change colours and opacity along the stroke and combining this with the existing ability to vary width, you can produce advanced photo-realistic drawings with only a few lines.

The real highlight of Illustrator CS6 is its new pattern handling capabilities. Select your starting objects and hit the Make Pattern command, and they open into a dedicated tiling environment. Using the Pattern Options panel, you can then select from different pattern types and control the tiling boundary. The result is a seamlessly tiling swatch that can be applied as a fill and creatively blended to create the richest possible formatting.

Illustrator often seems like Photoshop’s forgotten cousin but, as its new pattern capabilities demonstrate, there are many graphic jobs that are far more efficiently handled via vectors. After 25 years, Illustrator is still going surprisingly strong.

With big upgrades to the three main applications, Design Standard comes away from the CS6 overhaul very well. It remains a strong suite.

Click here to return to the full Adobe Creative Suite 6 review.