Why upgrade to InDesign CC 2014?

indesign CC v Indesign cs6

Learn whats new in InDesign CC and what the differences are from InDesign CS6

Back in 2013 Adobe changed the way that you buy its software, you no longer have to fork out a large amount on a one off purchase, everything is now subscription based, for a low monthly payment you can be a part of Adobes Creative Cloud (CC). The benefits are that you never have to pay costly upgrade fees as your software will automatically update when new features are added.

This new purchasing model has made Adobe InDesign more accessible than ever to a wide range of people – it is no longer a specialist piece of software for people in design based industries.

Alongside the many great features already included in InDesign CS6 there are some real improvements in InDesign CC 2014, Ive picked out my top five features that really make it worth upgrading…

 

Tables

Creating tables in InDesign has never been easier with great new drag and drop features.

Working with tables in InDesign was a fairly long and frustrating process, there was a lot of copying and pasting, selecting and deleting to get your tables in order. InDesign CC 2014 has addressed this issue making it much easier to just drag and move columns to get them exactly where you want them.

InDesign CC Tables

Colour Groups

Organising your swatches and finding specific colours just got much much easier

InDesign CC 2014 has finally caught up with its sister programme Illustrator adding colour groups to your swatches panel, now rather than all your swatches being in a long list you can organise your swatches in to small folders within your swatches panel, you can even import colour groups that you have previously created in Illustrator! Do you use Kuler colour themes? Well you will be very pleased to know that you can easily automatically create a colour group from a Kuler theme. You can even recoulour entire spreads with the click of a button to incorporate a new colour theme from a group in your swatches panel.

Colour Groups are our favourite new feature!

Indesign CC Colour Groups

ePub Fixed Layout

Are you new to eBooks? Well they are a bit of a minefield and can be a bit specialist but InDesign CC2014 has introduced ‘Fixed Layouts’. Traditionally with an eBook the text content would reflow for different devices, this is useful for long text documents but not very good for a designer or someone who has spent a lot of time incorporating images to a design. With a fixed layout ePub you export your design and it stays exactly how you wanted it, much like generating a PDF. The fixed layout ePub also supports audio, visual and all the interactive elements that InDesign CC 2014 has to offer. So get designing and put your work for sale on iTunes quickly and easily!

indesign CC fixed layout epub

Packaging

With the new release of InDesign CC 2014 you get the ability to include a PDF and IDML file in any package created from InDesign for individual documents.An IDML file enables the InDesign document to be opened in any earlier versions of InDesign. The PDF generated is a print ready version. You can choose to include or not include any of these files when you choose the ‘Package’ command in InDesign

indesign cc packaging

Scalable Effects

Earlier, transparency effects applied on an object in InDesign did not scale with the object. Now, all effects get applied. Effects such as drop shadows properly scale as you change the scale of an object or text. With the new Scalable Effects feature, an option to scale the transparency effects while scaling an object has been added in the Control panel and Transform panel flyout menus. You can activate scaling using this option.

indesign cc scalable effects

For a full list of comparable features between InDesign CS6 and InDesign CC you can look on the Adobe website HERE

adobe indesign training

You can download a full working 30 day trial of InDesign CC HERE

Mark Williams is the Director of Creative Studios Derby LTD, the East Midlands largest and most experienced Adobe training centre. If you need help learning any software from the Adobe Creative Suite, then contact us.

We regularly run Adobe InDesign Training Courses from our state of the art studio in Derby.

2 thoughts on “Why upgrade to InDesign CC 2014?

  1. Martin Woolley says:

    Good afternoon. We have the full Adobe Suite licenses but need Adobe CS6. Is this included or do we have to buy it separately? Your urgent answer would be much appreciated.
    Kind Regards, Martin

    1. Mark says:

      No sorry CS6 is no longer available unless you buy an old used copy, you will be able to open your files in CC though

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *