Chapter 2. Which Application Does What?

It's early on a Monday morning. You've just been handed a project to start. You turn on your computer and look at the list of applications in Creative Suite. How important is the decision as to which application you should use?

It's a lot more important than you might think. Choosing the right application can mean that you have certain features that aren't available in other applications, and can make it easier to move from the idea stage to the finished product. Choosing the wrong application may mean you get stuck at a certain point in your work and may need to spend time replicating the project in a different application.

In addition to which application you should choose, there is also the choice of how you should work within an application. For instance, if you work with InDesign for book production, should you work on one file that contains all the chapters of the book, or should you divide the project into separate files for each chapter? These are decisions that you want to make before you get too far along in the project.

In this chapter we'll look at many different types of design and production projects and go through the reasons why we choose to work in a particular application for those projects. For your convenience we've divided the projects into seven categories:

• Photographic Projects: photo retouching, photo enhancing, special effects, contact sheets and layer comps, and duotones.

• Books: novels, textbooks, art and picture books, and children's books.

• Other Long Documents: magazines and newspapers, annual reports, and catalogs.

• Enterprise Documents: stationery, business cards, price lists, labels, forms, and postcards and invitations.

• Design Projects: ads, CD/DVD labels and covers, brochures, movie posters, greeting cards, outdoor posters, book covers, matchbooks, logos and corporate identity, calendars, packaging, and fashion designs.

• Art and Illustration: fine art, technical drawings, maps, and charts and graphs.

• Web Pages and Web Graphics: web pages, web images, animations and movies, and web comps.

Of course, this is a subjective evaluation of which application to choose. There will certainly be times when you will choose a different workflow based on your own specific needs. Fortunately, the flexibility and options of Creative Suite 2 help make these decisions easy.