: InDesign or Illustrator for package design? I was debating with my students this week about which software to submit their files in for my package design class. A few advantages of InDesign

@Gonzalez368

I've worked at as an in-house designer for a publisher with it's own very large press, as well as a designer and art director for larger agencies, creating work for international clients (coke, mcdonalds, lipton), and I think you are spot on in your assessment of the programs & their use.


Illustrator is excellent for vectors, which is what printers are all about, but sucks at handling raster images.
Photoshop isn't ideal for print stuff, but people accomodate it due to it's widespread use as the #1 design program.
Indesign isn't a great creation tool, but does a great job at consolidating color profiles, keeping working vectors & laying out images. It's especially great for packaging because it's masters allow the creation of templates for consistency across product labels.


I've actually experienced situations where printers prefer illustrator exclusively because of the preflight plugins for it. Realistically, its more laziness because they can just as easily make any prepress adjustments off an appropriately exported PDF.

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@Murray664

As someone who's worked for and with multiple print shops,

From my personal experience everything is done in Illustrator and Photoshop.

Mostly Illustrator with Photoshop elements inside of it, as it is the most popular format to prepare for print.
Illustrator and Photoshop are the program you want to use to create things in because they have the highest amount of support for pre-press.

Esko, which is the most popular pre-press software, creates it's plugins for Illustrator and Photoshop, not InDesign. If you're printing in bulk you're probably not using digital printing. If you're not using digital printing you're probably using Esko software. If you're using Esko software you need to use Illustrator and Photoshop for the Esko plugins to make sure you have proper trapping, color layering, color separation etc...

Also as joojaa pointed out


PDF generated by InDesign is fine but since the press does not
exactly create pages as such but individual sheets many of the
features of indesign are counter productive for the prepress work


You will find most shops will ask for an EPS, PDF, or AI file.

Side Note: Most artwork is sent in PDF format. (Because everyone and their grandma can look at it without special software)

Extremely rarely does anything come in as InDesign. (When that happens everyone hates it and I haven't seen any in that format in years.)

InDesign is great for books and pamphlets but not print or packaging.

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@Tiffany317

Some printers require files to be submitted in Illustrator format, so ultimately it will come down to vendor requirements. However, I think of Illustrator and Photoshop as tools to generate layout resources, and InDesign as the best way to efficiently assemble those resources. Illustrator is great for creating the die cut and score template as well as all of the vector-based assets, but it is weak in areas where InDesign excels. Unless your vendor states otherwise, there is no reason not to get the most out of both platforms.

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