What is Adobe InDesign and what can it do for you? InDesign is a powerful publishing application that lets you work the way you want to work. You can use InDesign as a free-form but manual approach to layout, or as a structured but easily revised approach. The fact that you can choose which way to work is important for both novice and experienced users because there isn’t a single, correct way to lay out pages. Sometimes (for example, if your project is a single-instance publication), creating a layout from scratch — almost as if you were doing it by hand on paper — is the best approach. And sometimes using a highly formatted template that you can modify as needed is the way to go: There’s no need to reinvent the wheel for documents that have a structured and repeatable format.