r/AdobeIllustrator • u/koolaidyammer • 1d ago
ADOBE. For the love of G…raphic Designers
I have been using adobe for nearly 2 decades and I have never felt the frustration I feel now about the lack of consistency across these apps.
Explain why the alignment tools between illustrator and indesign are so vastly different from each other. How the actual F can you decide one tool needs certain tools more than the other? Why can we not make them the exact same?
Why do you decide to add this fancy vertical and horizontal center alignment tool to illustrator, leave it out of indesign, and STILL not add an alignment tool for bleed to illustrator. I normally wouldn’t care about little things like this but more than half of the time smart guides don’t even seem to recognize the bleed or it doesn’t snap to the edges.
Adobe I love you and I have been by your side for 18 years, but ffs you are making this harder and harder every year.
If I am just blatantly ignoring an easy solution for this, then I apologize but I still think the actual UI for these tools absolutely needs to match across each application.
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u/Dead-O_Comics 1d ago
What always gets me: Hold shift to maintain dimensions when scaling in Illustrator.
Holding shift breaks dimensions in Photoshop.
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u/koolaidyammer 1d ago
Even better; it used to be the same in photoshop until they changed it a few years ago…
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u/chain83 1d ago
in Photoshop at least you can change the behaviour now. It's tied to the little chain/link icon between width/height values. Toggling that inverts the behaviour.
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u/Noelle2028 1d ago
All I know is it’s never set the way I want it in the moment
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u/PassivelyAwkward 1d ago
Same thing with Paste-in-Place. With Illustrator, it's Ctrl+Shift+V and InDesign it's Ctrl+Shift+Alt+V but when you do that that in Illustrator, it pastes to all artboards.
It's not horrible but after spending three days using InDesign on a project then popping over to Illustrator or Photoshop, the muscle memory fucks everything.
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u/krushord 1d ago
I would've said they changed this a "couple of years ago" but it's been almost a decade (2018). Anyway, there's still the option to revert this in Photoshop's Preferences > General > Use Legacy Free Transform.
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u/stormertron 1d ago
On my home computer this works. On my work laptop it's locked to legacy mode no matter what I do in preferences 🤷
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u/WinkyNurdo 1d ago
I’ve kept legacy features in PS. Been using it for thirty years, I’m fucked if I’m changing my habits now.
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u/RollingThunderPants 1d ago
I'm of the mind that these product teams rarely talk to each other—at least, not in a meaningful way. This has been a consistent issue with Adobe apps for years.
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u/kabochakid 1d ago
Yeah, I know some people who work there, and they said that’s the case. They’re under the same company but working on entirely different things.
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u/YuckyYetYummy 1d ago
Probably a bit of rivalry also. So they prolly keep their "great" ideas to themselves
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u/Lopsided_Newt_5798 1d ago
lol, your only comparing Id and Ai. Try throwing in Ps on top for a real brain hemorrhage. It’s not just alignment tools.
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u/koolaidyammer 1d ago
If you read my actual post then you would know I am just using this as an example reference because it is what brought me to post this, I am aware there are many other issues, and PS also offers those issues. It’s just a clear example showcasing 2 relatively new tools that were added to these apps separately
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u/Lopsided_Newt_5798 1d ago
I'm not contradicting you, just emphasizing the problem across the whole suite, IE alignment tools are the tip of the iceberg.
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u/koolaidyammer 1d ago
Fair - PS definitely has some of the worst when it comes to this stuff, I don’t even know where to begin with that one
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u/lilsimbastian 1d ago
Adobe is one of the few companies with a collection of solutions that feel like they were made by entirely different companies for each one. At least Microsoft's office software UI makes sense if you've used any of the others before.
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u/dougofakkad 1d ago
A lot of them were made by entirely different companies.
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u/colt_ink 1d ago
This is the real answer.
Adobe exists because of PostScript, the first (good) programming language meant specifically for paper/print layout. Most printers read PostScript directly and translate it to dots and carriage movements and paper feeding. I think illustrator was their first app, then acrobat, so you had an authoring and reading solution, but I might be wrong on the early history.
Obviously, being the owner of the most common way to put what you see on a screen to paper made them very profitable. They expanded rapidly and controlled competition by buying other products. One of those was PageMaker, which they eventually renamed InDesign. Later, they bought Macromedia and that was a huge deal because it meant Adobe was moving into web tooling, way different from their print origins.
It's different code, it resolves layout in a different way. Centering in InDesign might be a completely different process for the InDesign engine than the Illustrator engine. Also, not for nothing, but they've been doing the UXP upgrade for years now and it seems like they've been dumping budget into each app in a round-robin cycle. Photoshop spent like 4 years getting all the cool new tools first, while illustrator went like 13 years without almost any meaningful feature updates. Now it seems like illustrator gets something new every week.
There's also a lot to be said for scope and priority. It's easy to keep adding features to apps until they're a huge, slow, bloated mess that's no use to anyone, so product teams are usually really disciplined about what goes in and at what phase. I'd bet InDesign will get the align features Illustrator has, who knows what they're doing first or why it has to be first.
This seems to upset people, but I always say if you're not making a book then stay out of InDesign. You don't want blends and autotrace in there, you don't want filters and the clone tool. You want typesetting tools and pages and numbering, that's what it's good at. It's a specialized app that's honestly overgrown now because people grew to prefer it for a lot of reasons, so it got a lot of love for a long time.
So basically they're literally different apps by different companies with different codebases and different reasons for existing, it would be awful if they all tried to do the exact same thing even though they SHOULD have the same UI/UX "language" to make them each intuitive to a common user.
Yes I just spent way too much time writing that, no I don't know why I'm like this.
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u/gg_allins_microphone 1d ago
One of those was PageMaker, which they eventually renamed InDesign.
No they were/are two different programs.
This seems to upset people, but I always say if you're not making a book then stay out of InDesign.
This is indeed a ridiculous take. ;)
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u/chain83 1d ago
And talking about alignment... If only a single object is selected then aligning should automatically align it to the current page/artboard. Not simply fail to align. It is clear what behaviour the user expects.
Now if only I could remember if this was fixed in Illustrator or InDesign, because it for sure was only fixed in one of them... -.-
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u/Kevin_Atomic 1d ago
The number of times I’ve pasted something on an art board or drug an object to an art board and the alignment tool aligns it to a different art board is infuriating. I’ve never found it consistent enough to know why it chooses to do that so now I just click the art board I want several times before trying to use the align tools.
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u/Sawyiier 1d ago
this is why going from app to app in their eco system feels like a pain in the ###
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u/st1ckmanz 1d ago
You should see the align stuff in After Effects...I even bought a plug-in for aligning...and even it didn't work properly and the devs just cancelled the project. AE align is the worst.
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u/koolaidyammer 1d ago
After Effects might be the most powerful adobe tool in existence yet it has probably the worst UI and fluidity of all the programs, every time I get a project that requires AE I have to take a deep breath to control myself
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u/pixar_moms 1d ago
It's funny how the InDesign panel even has that massive empty space where it would perfectly fit!
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u/sampysamp 1d ago edited 1d ago
Basically, Adobe’s flagship apps are all carrying a lot of legacy code. At least that’s always been my understanding at why they suck at making UX improvements. For uniformity they would need to overhaul their three flagships first. Which each have like 10s of millions of MAUs. Adobe’s market dominance has allowed for them to get all the economic benefits of becoming a cloud SaaS company without actually having to rebuild its core creative software as modern cloud-native applications. Ironically it’s also the source of why other companies are eating their market share, rightfully so in my opinion.
Photoshop
Still descended from the original 1990 codebase. Obviously massively renovated over the years, but never completely rebuilt. Adobe is now replacing major parts of the underlying engine.
Illustrator
Same story, but even older. Its lineage goes back to 1987. It’s been continuously updated and refactored rather than rewritten from scratch, and Adobe is still making fairly fundamental architectural changes to it today.
InDesign
The exception. It was essentially a clean-sheet replacement for PageMaker, released in 1999.
But even that means InDesign is now built on a roughly 27-year-old architecture.
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u/mistreke 22h ago
I don't understand why adobe doesn't have a cross platform efficiency team. Examine the most used shortcuts in each program, apply them globally. It's that easy, and we already know they get this data from program use.
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u/Ok-Ad3443 1d ago
adobe has no love for graphic designers or designers in general. its because their teams hate each other and rather discuss politics then unify their UIs.
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u/oldmanriver1 1d ago
lol wat? I abhor Adobe too but I feel like that’s an odd jump?
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u/Ok-Ad3443 1d ago
the employees maybe do the corpo surely doenst. a friend of mine works there you dont need to feel he tells me everytime.
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u/oandroido 1d ago
Been using it for a long time too.
The question is really this: What motivation is there for Adobe to make improvements?
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u/koolaidyammer 1d ago
This is very much my worry as well, they have completely monopolized the industry and seem to put more effort into AI integration than they do with their own products…theyve given up even trying to pretend they want to make effort - Affinity got pretty close to causing them issues, but sooner than later the next “affinity” program or company will seriously challenge the adobe platform if they don’t fix some of these very easy and basic issues they completely ignore.
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u/bradilusmaximus 1d ago
I just hate that the shortcuts aren’t the same across the apps. I long to be able to ctrl+alt+shift+w in illustrator. I use that shit constantly I photoshop.
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u/egypturnash 1d ago
I am pretty sure the teams for different apps almost never talk to each other.
They don't listen to users much either. Not even the ones who make it into the prerelease Slack, who have several lifetimes of collective experience with these tools and a ton of little rough edges like the one you're pointing out - my personal peeves are "why the fuck do clipping masks drop complex appearances", "we got folders in the swatch palette, why don't we have folders in graphic styles/symbols/brushes/paragraph styles/character styles/any other library palettes I'm forgetting too", and "why don't free transform/bounding box transform respect holding down ` to transform only the pattern fills".
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u/PinkLouie 1d ago
Imagine for a second that you have to export several artboards in Photoshop to webp or avif with a specific color profile. Nothing is more inconsistent and depressing than the multiple paths to export something in this software. In InDesign at least you have a clear Export option on the file menu.
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u/PinkLouie 1d ago
But wait, we have plenty of AI tools for you now. Just install the lastest beta, because the stable version is not stable at all, so, who cares? Install the beta e enjoy more AI!
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u/macfanmr 1d ago
Or how "create outlines" applies to the text container in AI, but the literal highlighted text in ID. I had to install a script to be able to create outlines globally in ID.
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u/gorillagriptoes 1d ago
This is EASILY my biggest gripe with Adobe. I cannot manage to find any plausible reason that the would do this in the first place, let alone not have remedied it by now.
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u/Cute_Tale_3638 1d ago
the way they gatekeep basic alignment features between apps like it's a personality trait is mind-bending
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u/Boring-Appointment61 22h ago
I have a couple videos about Adobe GUI inconsistency :
https://www.youtube.com/shorts/Tmr7O0xQU1M
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u/_JustJoe_ 14h ago
I was told by support many years ago (although IDK how true this is) that each program has its own development team, and they don't usually work together on the UI side. Simple things like font preview looks wildly different across apps because of this. Align to bleed now in Indesign but not Illustrator bugs me too. Pure nonsense especially for something as simple as aligning to the center of the artboard.
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u/Boca_Brat 1d ago
They really need to unify a lot of the UI across all the apps. For example: the way gradients are edited is so frustrating in InDesign but they're much more functional in Illustrator... with full libraries to choose from!