For Graphic Print Design: All serious graphic designers know that the industry standard for graphic design software is Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator and QuarkXpress or Adobe InDesign. If you are not familiar with these products here is a quick overview. Adobe Photoshop is photographic image manipulation software. Photoshop is where you will manipulate, clean up, re-touch, or re-color all the bitmap photographic images for your design project. Adobe Illustrator is vector art software and you will use it to create vector images such as logos and illustrations for you design project. QuarkXpress and Adobe InDesign are graphic layout programs. This is where you will literally combine all the pieces for a design project and lay them out. You will add your text, manipulated Adobe Photoshop images, and created Adobe Illustrator vectors images to this program and layout the finished product, which may be a brochure, flyer, etc.
For Graphic Web Design: Graphic web design has more options for software. Web design is not quite as specific with their software requirements as print design. As far as industry standard, the industry has really left it up to the designer to decide. I prefer to use Adobe Photoshop to create most of my imagery and then use Adobe ImageReady (which comes with Photoshop) to make my files optimized for the web and then use Adobe GoLive for my web site layout. Adobe GoLive is a great software product for designers who are not as skilled with HTML coding because GoLive does the coding for you, but if you prefer to do the coding yourself you are given the option of doing this as well. Another fun software program for web design is Macromedia Flash. Flash creates very fun animation and mini movies that give your site movement, but is not recommended that you design your entire site in Flash because of poor search engine optimization. Macromedia also has a product called DreamWeaver that is a web site creation and layout program.
About the Author
Katrina Rauch is the President/Creative Director of KaTasidy. KaTasidy was founded in 2002 and is operated out of Denver, Colorado. Visit www.KaTasidy.com and sign up for our FREE monthly eZine, Solutions, at www.KaTasidy.com.