Adobe Design Collection 3.0

Adobe Design Collection includes the following applications:

• InDesign 1.5: Adobe InDesign 1.5 offers professional page layout and design for graphic designers, production artists, and prepress professionals. It delivers a high level of Adobe integration, creative freedom, productivity, and precision. InDesign 1.5 works seamlessly with Adobe Photoshop and Adobe Illustrator, providing a single, integrated design environment that doesn't interrupt your creative process.
• Photoshop 6: Adobe Photoshop 6 introduces the next generation of image editing with powerful new features that offer something for every user. Combine vector drawing tools and new layer design features that greatly enhance your creative options, output razor-sharp text and shapes from Photoshop, and take advantage of an expanded Web tool kit that includes the new ImageReady 3.0 software for advanced Web processing.
• Illustrator 9: Adobe Illustrator 9 expands your creative freedom and enhances your productivity with its new Web graphics tools, versatile transparency capabilities, powerful object and layer effects, and other innovative features. Now you can use these fast, flexible tools to transform your creative ideas into sophisticated graphics for use on the Web, in print, or in dynamic media projects.
• Acrobat 5: Adobe Acrobat 5 lets you easily convert any document to an Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) file. Whether you create business plans, spreadsheets, graphically rich brochures, or Web sites, Acrobat 5 is an essential tool. Anyone with the free Adobe Acrobat Reader can open your Adobe PDF file across a broad range of hardware and software. It will look and print exactly as intended. Save on printing, mailing, and warehousing by easily distributing compact, secure, searchable Adobe PDF files with Adobe Acrobat 5.

The last application in the box is InDesign. I love InDesign, Adobe's new page layout tool. Not everyone shares my opinion. If you're doing books that require heavy indexing or foot and end notes, you may be better served by PageMaker and the Adobe Publishing Collection or FrameMaker. Also, many commercial printers won't support InDesign files because of bugs in version 1.0 (current version is 1.5.2). If you're in a heavy production environment like a magazine, you should look at Quark Xpress, because your staff will probably already be trained but Quark is known for horrible tech support. InDesign will do all the above, and elegantly, but you may need to buy a plug-in for indexing or other special needs. The bottom line is that you won't find a better deal for a complete professional package.