The Right Tools for the Job

Take a good look at any successful company, and you'll find a team of people who all work together toward a common goal. The employees, each with his or her own strengths, are coordinated by a masterful president or CEO. Successful sports teams share similar traitstake basketball, for example.

A basketball team has five players: a center, whose primary job is to score; two guards, whose primary job is to get the ball to the center; and two forwards, whose primary job is to be an alternative option to score (see Figure 1.1). There is also a coach who coordinates plays and aids in communication among players. Each player possesses specific talents to do his or her job.

Figure 1.1. The five players on a basketball team.

With good communication and leadership, a team like we just described could take advantage of each team member's abilities to score every time. Because each team member has diverse skills, the team could score in any number of ways, depending on what challenge or situation they were facing. In contrast, a team that had only one kind of player might be able to do one certain play very well, but might fail if other kinds of plays were required.

So why are we talking about basketball here? Well, interestingly enough, you can look at a group of design tools in the very same way. At the center you have page layout, where your page comes together. You have two elements, photographs and illustrations, being fed into the page layout (and text), and you have two ways to publish your work, either on the Web or in print.

Think of the Adobe Creative Suite as the dream team of software (see Figure 1.2). Illustrator and Photoshop feed photos and graphics to InDesign, the page-layout software. GoLive represents web publishing, and Acrobat, print publishing. Version Cue and Bridge act like coaches, bringing the whole team together.

Figure 1.2. The five players on the Adobe Creative Suite team.

What makes Adobe Creative Suite unique is that the individual programs in the suite are all professional programs that can perform various tasks on their own. In fact, some tasks can be done in any of several applications in the Suite. For example, a business card can be done in InDesign or Illustrator (or a combination of both). We'll discuss when you should use each of the applications in Chapter 2, "So Many Applications: Which One to Use?" Before we get to that stage, however, let's take a closer look at the components in the Creative Suite.