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Rating: 
Summary: Studio in a box
Review: Four great packages for the price of two! The Adobe Design Collection is graphic design studio in a box. You need Photoshop in any studio and version 6 has some really nice interface enhancements and web features. ImageReady 3 (part of the Photoshop install) makes very quick work of page slicing, and gif animation for those times that you are working on web content instead of print. Adobe won the vector drawing war years ago, and Illustrator 9 does a great job. Got a Wacom Tablet? If you do, Photoshop and Illustrator have fantastic tablet support. If you don't have a tablet, this is the best excuse to buy one. The last "must have" in this box is Acrobat. Clients and many printers expect you produce PDF documents and you'll need the full version of Acrobat to tweak things like thumbnails, and bookmarks for clients or adding pages before prepress. The last application in the box is InDesign. I love InDesign, Adobe's new page layout tool. Not everyone shares my opinion. If you're doing books that require heavy indexing or foot and end notes, you may be better served by PageMaker and the Adobe Publishing Collection or FrameMaker. Also, many commercial printers won't support InDesign files because of bugs in version 1.0 (current version is 1.5.2). If you're in a heavy production environment like a magazine, you should look at Quark Xpress, because your staff will probably already be trained but Quark is known for horrible tech support. InDesign will do all the above, and elegantly, but you may need to buy a plug-in for indexing or other special needs. The bottom line is that you won't find a better deal for a complete professional package.
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