| What happens when you take some of the world’s best-known creative and production tools – Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Flash, Fireworks, and more – and put them together? Yes, you get Adobe’s Creative Suite 3. And as you should expect with programs like these the result is rather special. To put it simply, this is the world’s most powerful software suite for graphic designers, publishers, web masters, multimedia producers, printers, video editors, and everyone else that needs to create compelling digital or printed media. The Creative Suite 3 is also far more than the sum of its parts, great though they are. The diff erent tools are even better integrated now than with previous versions of the Creative Suite; you can take your work from one program to another, taking advantage of each one’s unique abilities in the process.
But how are you going to get the most from this extraordinary collection of genre-defi ning tools? Knowing where to start with the various parts of the Creative Suite, let alone how to make them work well together, can be a daunting task. Adobe has spent a lot of time and eff ort making these programs work together, and those that take the time to learn the ins and outs of the suite as a whole will fi nd themselves more productive and creatively eff ective than ever before. But with programs as diverse as these, few people have the time to become experts in the multiple disciplines, no matter how important that is.
Creative Suite Integration was written with one specifi c goal in mind: to help you become that confi dent cross-discipline practitioner we all need to be these days. It aims to help you put the whole of Creative Suite 3 to work by using it all more eff ectively in whatever you need to do. As well as the research and testing that has gone into these pages, I wrote it from my personal experience in the world of designs, print, multimedia, and web production, and from experience as a trainer and as MacUser magazine’s Technical Editor. Adobe’s Creative Suite 3 really is an extraordinary powerhouse, the sort of thing we could only dream of not so long ago. If you’re relatively new to the industry you picked a great time to get going. And if you’re an old hand who remembers the DTP wars of the 1990s or even slicing up typeset galleys and sending out for fi lm steps, then welcome, come on in; this is where it gets fun all over again! |
