If there was an award for least intuitive design tool, Adobe InDesign would be my clear favorite. Even after decades of occasional use, selecting things, changing a color, resizing an image, and other super basic stuff remains absolutely unintuitive and I have to keep asking AI for how those things work. Always makes me super appreciative of the latest generation of design tools.
Replies (8)
What are the design tools of latest generation?
of all the years I worked doing design, InDesign was my absolute favorite tool. very misunderstood. most people use it wrongly as if it was a sort of illustrator where in reality it is an automation beast. you're not supposed to go and fiddle with things directly, you need to use styles for everything. once you understand that concept and the power it gives, you'll find it all makes sense...
I'd say Figma and Sketch for many digital designers. Complemented with photo editing tools like Pixelmator and image gen like Midjourney. Also tools like Spline for 3D and Rive for motion. They could take fresh, focused approaches and don't have to deal with the weight of their legacy. Print still seems to be mostly with the Adobe toolbox.
What do you use or see used a lot?
You know, I am just realizing that I meant to write Illustrator in my post. Not sure why I wrote InDesign 🤦🏽.
Totally get your point about InDesign. For things like book layouts, you want to work with a solid grid and text styles and let things automatically flow.
Correcting myself. I meant to write Adobe Illustrator and not InDesign.
oh,
well yes, illustrator is a shitshow since forever. adobe should have kept freehand as the vector tool when they bought macromedia. much more intuitive with that sort of stuff.
I’m very looking forward to AI design tools, where the interface will be replaced by just a voice commands. I hope for 3-5 years from now.
As a designer, I hate to switch between platforms and searching for tools inside them. It seriously kills my mojo...
btw I switched from Adobe to Affinity 5 years ago (after 10 years of using adobe almost daily) and I’m very happy with that decision. Works great for all raster, vector and print stuff.
I've seen two hype waves around chat/voice interfaces before, making me a bit skeptical about whether those can ever work. First one was when Intercom and co were a big deal (2012 or so), and every website just had to have a chatbox. Then Alexa and co launched a few years later. Tons of experimentation with voice that didn't go far. Sure, we have AI now, but I am still skeptical. Voice/chat are so imprecise and slow compared to a keyboard and a mouse (or even fingers on a touch screen).
But I am always happy to be proven wrong. AI has already given us lots of superpowers, maybe there are more to come.
