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JULY 2004

PRODUCT REVIEW:
Adobe Creative Suite
By Mitchell Levine

At first glance, Adobe’s latest release begs the question, “How do you improve upon perfection?” Answer: you make it faster, more feature-rich, and easier to use. And that’s exactly what the developers appear to have done. Combining several of their flagship applications into a well-integrated modular suite, at its most basic, the Creative Suite Premium Edition contains Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobat Professional 6, Go Live, and Photoshop CS with Image Ready, and with an optional Pagemaker module available as well.

Of course, that’s an indispensable set of design applications, if not, in fact, the literal state-of-the-art. But that’s just the surface of what CS has to offer: in addition, it presents some of the most helpful, user-friendly features a technology professional in education could ask for. I’ll assume that if you’re reading this, you most likely recognize the above software titles; if you don’t, in brief, the above apps allow you to manipulate, create, enhance, distill, and print just about any kind of web or print graphic, photo, or multimedia file.

However, new to the CS suite is the powerful file management system, Version Cue. The Version Cue system allows a single user to track various versions of a single project, and several networked users to share various versions of a collaborative project. The benefits of this for education are obvious: teachers can flip through all of the various conceptual stages of a project in development, and whole classes can collaborate on collective works far more easily than any system I’ve personally tested. The tighter integration of the applications impacts on this as well, because the software now shares palettes and commands, and generally makes switching between applications much smoother—really a must for any kind of sophisticated print or web design work. Also worth mentioning are the many tutorials and the very helpful Design Guide as well.

Trying to describe all of the new features within the space of a short article is probably impossible. Just to touch on a few, I personally found the keyboard shortcut remapping, support for native files in InDesign CS, and improved support for 3D in Illustrator to be the most impressive, but this will, of course, depend on exactly what you’d like to use the product to do. I’d imagine that whether the user is a teacher of web or image design, an in-school IT supervisor developing a class or extra-curricular site, or just a 3rd or 4th year student, the CS package will offer a significant improvement in efficiency, power, and convenience in comparison to the various stand-alone products used separately.

A few words about the various special programs Adobe offers the education user: first off, the company makes a very generous discount available to students, teachers, and qualified institutions, as well as volume licensing and discounted technical support. Much more information about this can be found on the website. In addition, the Adobe Web Tech curriculum has been updated to accommodate the CS user as well, providing a full year-long online learning opportunity aligned to national standards. Plus, curricula guides for InDesign CS, Pagemaker CS, and Acrobat 6 Professional can be had, and a full platform for curricula exchange for Adobe education users.

Unfortunately, I have space only for a few of the highlights of this vast software product. Probably the best thing I can do is just say “highly recommended,” and direct you to www.adobe.com, where you can find not only much more detail, but download multimedia features guides and tutorials as well.#

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