[sackwacking]

what are the common softwares graphic designer's use? i'd like to major in graphic design, but i dont know which software to start using. right now i use adobe photoshop, flash, and illustrator.
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"The snozzberries taste like snozzberries!"

[B0b]

i prefer freehand over illustrator- but i've been using Freehand since v2 and illustrator since 1.1 - i didn't get on with illustrator but found freehand much more user friendly when learning...

with the one's you're already learning, you won't do wrong..

graphic design also involves page layout - for this u have a choice:

Freehand (more for vector illustration purposes but can still do page layout- my old art director used to sware by it)
Illustrator (again main purpose is illustration)
Indesign (pure page layout)
Pagemaker (""")
QuarkXPress (""")
CorelDraw (spit) (cheap affordable dire illustration/pagelayout etc) (don't know if its fixed now, but CorelDraw couldn't import its own eps file...)
Publisher (/me hangs self) (M$ page layout app - also dire)
and a load of other - Page Serif etc...

[stacy]

What I use,
for PRINTED MATTER:

Photoshop, for raster.
CorelDraw, for vector.
InDesign, for layout, compositing.
CorelPainter8, Illustration
Mirage, for raster. This is also on the video list, but it is an extremely good paint program.
Acrobat (of course), for portability
Pantone set, Paper samples from various printers and publishers, extras but necessary.

-- I guess I'm lucky. The company I work for whines about constant upgrades for the dozens of marketers, but my graphics dept. can have pretty much what I ask for. I can get, and have tried just about everything there is, and that's the best combination of tools available.

I've trained four assistants under me on Corel, and all came to me knowing Illustrator as a vector tool, because Adobe markets very heavily to schools and colleges and that's what they've learned on. They all now use Corel and love it. It's different so it takes getting used to, but once you catch on it's much easier to use. You can do in less than an hour with CorelDraw what Illustrator takes up to a half day to do. And trying to say it's just the user and not the app is absolute patent bull-sh*t. --


For ANIMATION:
ToonBoom Studio.
(I have Flash but since they got me ToonBoom I haven't touched it.)
LightWave. (It probably should be on the top of the list, but I've never had the time to learn to use it right.)


For VIDEO:
VideoToaster[3]
Premiere Pro 1.5
VegasVideo5, has amazing HDV and audio tools.
Ulead DVDWorkshop
TMPGenc encoder
Mirage


Things to FORGET ABOUT:
PageMaker, it's defunct.
QuarkExpress, -- unless the boyz in lower downtown Denver do something amazing in the next year or so Quark is going the way of PageMaker. --(I do keep an OLD copy of Quark around because we still have one die-hard publisher that is still stuck on Quark and won't accept InDesign files.)
CorelRave, I'll take back a previous remark. I HAVE used Flash...to recompress the the giant crummy swf files that Rave generates.


Things to KEEP AN EYE ON:
The MacroMedia suite.

-- MacroMedia just keeps getting better and better.
Fireworks is going to overtake Photoshop someday. Just wait and see. And the transparancy between apps is almost as seamless as Corel. --