With Adobe recently increasing the price of their creative suite, we have been looking some some alternatives to some of their more popular apps, such as PhotoShop and Illustrator.
Today, we’re looking at Adobe InDesign, used primarily for digital publishers to create brochures, magazines, newspapers and books. Here are some cheaper (or free) alternatives:
Xara Page & Layout Designer 11
$89.99 and pay for future upgrades – Design printed material, from logos and business cards to flyers, posters, and brochures, makes professional workflows possible, with support for PDF/X and professional color systems (CMYK, Pantone & HSV)
Scribus
A free opensource desktop publishing program available on all platforms, supports professional publishing features, such as CMYK colors, spot colors, ICC color management and versatile PDF creation, powerful vector drawing tools, support for a huge number of file types via import/export filters, emulation of color blindness or the rendering of markup languages
Viva Designer
The full version of the latest software for personal use is £99 with other options such as commercial or government – Runs on all operating systems and modern web browsers, user-friendly despite having over 1000 functions, complement or substitution for InDesign or XPress, economically priced and single purchase (pay for upgrades/ cross upgrades).
Affinity Publisher (up and coming)
Free beta download, likely to be the best publishing program after InDesign – keep an eye out for this one.