Product Reviews

There are two reasons why Creative Suite is so successful. First, it's good value, especially when compared with the price of its constituent parts. Second, every app in the box works with the others, so when you know one, you're familiar with them all.

Not only that, but the graphics you edit in Photoshop slip as easily onto a page in InDesign as they do on a site in Dreamweaver. You can repurpose your InDesign pages for the web just as easily as for print. Then there's Version Cue and Bridge, which work hand in hand to keep everything in order.

When using Creative Suite it's best to think in terms of content rather than the application in which its made. So an image could be a source file you're editing now, or an asset you're placing in Dreamweaver, where it'll be linked back to the application that created it for one-click editing.

But CS3's integration isn't perfect, hence the need for this book. In typography, for example, Keith Martin outlines how 'some

To help understand how the constituent parts work together, he leads us through eight workshops, the assets for which are included on the bundled CD. The most ambitious, producing a website, spans Photoshop, Illustrator, Flash, Fireworks and Dreamweaver, while the no less adventurous gatefold brochure project uses Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Version Cue and Acrobat. These are dotted strategically throughout the book, breaking up the more descriptive tracts that lead us through core concepts common to each application.

As you'd expect of a Focal Press edition, whose raison d'etre is books by and for creatives, the look and feel is first class. The grabs are as attractive as they are informative, and each chapter opens with photos from around the world, which although entirely unrelated bring colour to what could otherwise be a dry subject.

It may span a wide range of applications, but the remit of this book - how to use them together - is narrow, and all the better for it. If you want to explore the benefits that investing in an end-to-end solution from one software house can deliver, this is the book.

Covering everything from the old (Dreamweaver font families, for example) to the new (smart objects) it will pay to keep this book to hand. It may be overkill for the single-app worker, but it is a handy reference source for anyone who works across two or more CS3 apps at once, and essential for those doing so both in print and online.