Chapter Ten. Working with Versions and Reviews

It's odd that creative tools have evolved through the years without addressing two critical points in the creative process: managing versions and setting up reviews. In this information age, our team members and clients are no longer working beside us or down the street but rather on the other side of the country or in another country altogether.

Thankfully, Adobe has recognized the need for tools to help us work more collaboratively with our team and our clients regardless of whether or not they're in the same office. Adobe CS2 Premium includes Acrobat 7 Professional, the de facto standard when it comes to working with PDF documents. Whether you need to start a review, add comments, or make minor edits to a PDF, Acrobat is the application to reach for. Also in CS2 is a brand-new edition of Adobe's versioning and workflow management tool, Version Cue CS2. Version Cue CS2 offers a robust set of features and tight integration throughout the suite along with the ability to view and manage your versions via Adobe Bridge.

In this chapter, I intend to highlight ways you can use these two powerful tools to help you explore different directions in your designs and manage those inevitable changes as well as help you set up PDF reviews and work with the comments you receive in them.