Many of our smaller clients prefer to handle their design work in-house rather than employing a third party. However, this comes with its own advantages and disadvantages – and one of the biggest concerns is choosing the right design software that is both easy to use but that doesn’t limit the scope of the artwork itself. Here are our thoughts on the current options:
The key players are Adobe, Quark, Microsoft Publisher and Word, and Coral Draw. The Adobe Suite can be considered to have the edge with around 60% of all of our clients using it to design their own artwork. We believe Adobe can definitely be considered the market leader. Its Illustrator program is your best bet for producing the most print friendly outcome and its usability is particularly enhanced with various online tutorials providing great user information. Microsoft Word and Publisher are on the rise. However, Publisher does not have a standard PDF (Portable Document Format) output meaning an online conversion is required: zamzar.com is good for this.
What are the minimum requirements of a software package?
The software should allow bespoke sizes as opposed to just A4 and A5 and for all images to have a crisp professional look, the software should also be able to output at a minimum of 300dpi and in a CMYK (Cyan Magenta Yellow Key) format. The RGB (Red Green Blue) output, when converted to CMYK, can produce some unexpected outcomes. For example florescent green turns to a dull cameo green when converted.
In the future it would be great to see screen to print discrepancies solved with a feature that would allow the user to view the design as it would be printed. Unfortunately, as of yet technology does not allow for unexpected print outcomes caused by paper absorbency for example, meaning sometimes designers are faced with an unsatisfactory design result.
Not matter how much you spend on the software each programme will have its own little idiosyncrasies which you will only come to understand once you’ve been working with it for a while. For example, when using Quark and Indesign it is essential to save artwork as a high resolution PDF before sending it to us. Without doing this, fonts and pictures may not be embedded into the design meaning that when we receive it, default fonts will be used instead and pictures will not be displayed.
Another common mistake is when saving a JPEG (Joint Photographics Experts Group) file from Photoshop, quality can be lost as once saved it can become pixelated. In order to avoid this you should save as a TIFF (Tagged Image File Format) as this will stop any compression and maintain the original quality.
If you are about to purchase a new design suite, are about to save finished artwork or anywhere in between and would like a second opinion, then don’t hesitate to call our client team.
