Adobe's Suite Ambitions

Computerworld - Adobe Creative Suite (CS) from Adobe Systems Inc. is like a Swiss Army Knife for designers. Tucked inside are updated versions of the Adobe Illustrator drawing program, Photoshop image editor, GoLive Web page designer, InDesign page design software and Acrobat PDF creation tool. All of the tools are well integrated and share a common look and feel.
There's even a new workflow tool, called Version Cue, that does things like group project files into common folders and track different versions over time and enables users to collaborate with other designers on the same project.
But there's a catch: To get the full benefits, you'll have to use all of the applications, especially InDesign. Many designers use QuarkXPress. Are the CS's benefits enough to convince designers to switch?
To find out, Computerworld put Adobe CS into the hands of our internal design team—all QuarkXPress users—to see how the suite would fare in a large-scale publishing operation.
Inside the Box
It takes about 20 minutes to install Adobe CS. The suite requires 1.7GB of disk space and runs on Windows XP or Mac OS X.
Consistent menus and feature sets are a hallmark of the suite, but "the best part of the suite is the integration between InDesign and Photoshop," says design director Stephanie Faucher. Users can drag and drop images to embed them in InDesign, which creates a picture box, places the art and sizes it for you automatically. Clicking on the image transports the designer directly into Photoshop, where he can adjust the size or resolution, save changes and return to InDesign without missing a beat.
When they use a mix of applications, designers must leave the page-layout program, open the photo editor, find and edit the image file, save it, and then go back into the design program and update the image in the layout. "[CS] is a real time-saver, even if I'm working on a single-page, single-photo layout," says April O'Connor, associate art director at Computerworld.
Images or graphics embedded in GoLive Web pages or Acrobat files can also be edited in the same way.
Making the leap from QuarkXPress to InDesign is intuitive and easy. "Many of the tools will be recognizable to Quark users," such as the pen, text tool and line tool, Faucher says. InDesign also uses the same "quick key" shortcuts that Quark uses and presents similar menu options and palette designs. And it adds new features such as nested style sheets and an eyedropper tool, similar to Photoshop's, that you can use to