Design Software Recommended by Top Design Professional
For Graphic Print Design: All serious graphic designers know
that the industry standard for graphic design software is Adobe
Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign.
If you are not familiar with these products here is a quick
overview. Adobe Photoshop is photographic image manipulation
software. Photoshop is where you will manipulate, clean up,
re-touch, or re-color all the bitmap photographic images for
your design project. Adobe Illustrator is vector art software
and you will use it to create vector images such as logos and
illustrations for you design project. QuarkXpress and Adobe
InDesign are graphic layout programs. This is where you will
literally combine all the pieces for a design project and lay
them out. You will add your text, manipulated Adobe Photoshop
images, and created Adobe Illustrator vectors images to this
program and layout the finished product, which may be a
brochure, flyer, etc.
For Graphic Web Design: Graphic web design has more options for
software. Web design is not quite as specific with their
software requirements as print design. As far as industry
standard, the industry has really left it up to the designer to
decide. I prefer to use Adobe Photoshop to create most of my
imagery and then use Adobe ImageReady (which comes with
Photoshop) to make my files optimized for the web and then use
Adobe GoLive for my web site layout. Adobe GoLive is a great
software product for designers who are not as skilled with HTML
coding because GoLive does the coding for you, but if you prefer
to do the coding yourself you are given the option of doing this
as well. Another fun software program for web design is
Macromedia Flash. Flash creates very fun animation and mini
movies that give your site movement, but is not recommended that
you design your entire site in Flash because of poor search
engine optimization. Macromedia also has a product called
DreamWeaver that is a web site creation and layout program.