Adobe Photoshop Design Collection 6.0

Adobe Illustrator has traditionally been reserved for the print and prepress marketplace, but recent versions have targeted a broader audience, including a growing contingent of new-school Web designers. With the latest incarnation of Illustrator, Adobe aims to please both print and prepress designers, as well as cutting-edge Web designer communities. Illustrator manages to enhance its existing drawing tools with powerful productivity aids. And by focusing on important workflow, productivity, and database-connectivity features, Adobe has given the user more time to explore new creative possibilities.

With Photoshop, Adobe continues to come up with an awe-inspiring mix of great new features, productivity enhancements, and tweaks and treats. Version 7 is no exception. One of Photoshop's many strengths is the versatility of its tools, and this has been stretched to new limits. Filter previews are bigger, the liquify tool has been enhanced, brush parameters have been extended, and commonly used tool settings can be saved as presets. Photoshop continues to add more features for the Web developer as well as the professional designer. For example, the creation of rollovers is simpler, and a new "selected" rollover state takes some of the repetitive strain out of nav bar production. All in all, this is an upgrade guaranteed to keep Photoshop at the cutting edge of professional image editing.

InDesign is all about creative page layout. A high-end desktop publishing product, it is aimed squarely at professional designers who need maximum flexibility alongside strong document management and support for industry standards. Eye-catching features such as transparency and blending are combined with more mundane, but important, abilities such as table-of-contents creation and index generation, to make this a more complete and rounded product than earlier versions. Creativity in print has never been easier.

Acrobat is PDF-creation software from the people who first established the PDF standard. PDF (Portable Document Format) remains the best way to make documents that can be read by anyone on any platform. Installation is easy and features a function button that you can added to Office applications such as Word, Excel, and PowerPoint. When you have written a document in these programs, simply click the PDF button on the toolbar and it will guide you through saving it as a PDF. Anyone with Acrobat Reader, which is free and available for download from Adobe's Web site, can view the documents. These documents can also be uploaded to Internet sites or onto networks.

Adobe Design Collection 6.0 is a fantastic package that places award-winning print, design, and Web authoring applications into one affordable package. --Chris Ryan