Adobe Creative Suite

After the launch of the latest Acrobat a few months ago, everything went surprisingly quiet on the Adobe front. Now it's clear just what the company was working on with the simultaneous launch of each of its main creative design packages - Photoshop/ImageReady, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive!

The fact that they've all arrived at once isn't coincidence, for just as Macromedia has done with Studio and its MX applications, Adobe offering them together in one all-encompassing Creative Suite (CS). There are actually two versions: Standard Edition offering the main print-oriented flagships - Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign - and the Professional Edition throwing in the web-oriented GoLive and Acrobat Professional for good measure.

Besides the combined price, there's a lot going for the suite as a whole. Each of its applications has been brought into line over the past few revisions, with similar working environments and workflows. Behind the scenes the integration is even tighter with shared technologies for handling colour management, screen display, type handling and so on. Therefore Illustrator files can be opened into Photoshop with layers, transparency and text intact and vice versa.

Each of the main creative applications offers rich support for the latest PDF 1.5 format so that you can import and export directly. T^hi smeans that now you can embed vector PDFs from Illustrator and bitmap PDFs from Photoshop in a multi-page InDesign PDF, then export it for PDF web display or repurposing via GoLive. Another advantage is the PDFs involved can be reviewed and commented on using just Acrobat itself.

As any standalone designer knows, managing the different components and versions of your projects is a major part of the job and with a workgroup the problems multiply tenfold. Adobe's solution is an integrated file management system called Version Cue. This technology - optional incidentally - allows you to store all job elements and important versions of your projects in a single workspace via each application's Save dialog. You can then access thumbnails of these project files from each application's Open dialog and are warned if other users are working on the same files. You can also search for files based on relevant information such as previous author or keywords embedded with Adobe's new open XMP (eXtensible Metadata Platform) standard.

As the individual reviews show, each of the CS applications is impressive and a worthy upgrade in its own right, but they really excel when used together. Of course you'll still have to weigh up exactly how the suite would suit your own working practices, but this is really a superb value and incredibly well designed suite.

Author: Tom Arah