My client's brand guide crashed InDesign 3 times yesterday

I spent all Tuesday rebuilding a 60 page brand guide for a restaurant chain in Austin and InDesign kept freezing on me when I tried to export the PDF. The file was only 40 MB but it would lock up every time I added a swatch or even typed a text box. Has anyone else dealt with this bug or is it just my laptop being garbage?

2 comments

2 Comments

theabennett3d ago

Oh man, that sucks. My friend Sarah had the same thing happen to her with a menu template for a local diner. She finally just saved everything as IDML and it stopped freezing up, but she lost an hour of work that first time. I think InDesign just hates brand guides with a bunch of swatches for some reason. Hope you got it sorted without too much more pain.

rose_murray2d ago

Your friend Sarah lost an hour of work" - yeah well maybe she should have been saving more often. Look, I get that InDesign crashes are annoying but blaming the SOFTWARE every time is getting old. First off, 40 MB for a brand guide is actually pretty big especially if you're packing in high res images or vector swatches. Second, have you actually checked your laptop's specs lately? Most people running InDesign on a base model laptop with 8GB of RAM are asking for trouble. I've been using InDesign for years and the ONLY time it crashes on me is when I'm pushing the file way past reasonable limits. Try flattening some of those transparency effects or rasterizing a few elements before you blame Adobe. Maybe run a disk utility tool too cause corrupted font caches cause more crashes than actual software bugs.