Adobe Creative Cloud 2014

If you’re a graphic designer, you no doubt know that Adobe released new versions of the major apps in their Creative Cloud subscription this past week.

I’ve been using InDesign CC 2014 the last few days, and had no troubles at all with the software. While Adobe focused on specific features for all the apps, it’s often the case that the little things make all the difference. For me, this is definitely the case with the latest InDesign. There are two new features that make a world of difference for me.

Color Swatch groupThe first feature I immediately fell in love with is the ability to group color swatches in the Swatches panel into folders. This is much like the ability to create folders in Photoshop’s Layers panel. Now this seems like a trivial little feature at first, but for me it’s huge.

I like to to create a default set of color swatches that is available for all new documents. You do this by creating the color swatches with no documents open. The problem is that I have a few clients that use numerous colors (over 20 for one client alone). When you have that many colors in the panel, you end up doing a lot of scrolling. The problem is compounded by the fact that I don’t use all the colors for each job, only that particular client’s color.

With InDesign Creative Cloud 2014, I can create a folder for each client containing only that client’s color swatches. When I’m not working on Client A’s job, I can keep their color swatch folder closed and not have to scroll through them to get to the swatches I need.

Very slick!

I nearly missed my second favorite feature, as it is hidden in plain sight. I have clients that require not only a high-res PDF, but a full set of working files – including an IDML file because they’re using an older version of InDesign. So normally I have to do a Collect for Output, then export a high-res PDF, then do a Save As and choose the IDML file option. That’s three steps. It’s no big deal for one file, but when I need to collect dozens of files it becomes time consuming and it’s easy to forget to create a PDF or save an IDML file here or there.

Collect for Output
With InDesign CC 2014, Adobe has added the ability to export an IDML file, and create a PDF using the preset of your choosing right in the Collect for Output dialog box.

This is a fantastic time-saver!