5 Applications Every Graphic Designer Should Know

Photoshop has become more than just a tool used for photo retouching. It is used for digital painting, illustration coloring and even page layout. It is extremely versitle and needs to be experimented with a constant basis.

Adobe Illustrator.

If you want clean looking logos, Illustrator is your best choice. Also if you have any original graphics you need in a large output, Illustrator is going to insure those graphics look tight and give you no pixelation.

Adobe InDesign/Quark Xpress.

This is a bit of a cheat, but every designer needs to have a good page layout application in their arsenal. Quark Xpress was leader of the pack for a few years, but since InDesign works hand-in-hand with Photoshop and Illustrator, it has been making inroads into the market. Which one is better? That argument can go back and forth, but since InDesign is packaged with the Adobe CS3 suite, along with Photoshop and Illustrator, it makes it awfully tempting.

Adobe Dreamweaver.

Web design at it's simplest. Dreamweaver makes it simple for the novice designer/developer. It is also an Adobe product, so working in tandem with Photoshop is very streamlined. The step-by-step setup for new websites in intuitive and the templates can be saved for any number of designs you create. It is web development program for beginners and pros.

Final Cut.

Wow! It's not an Adobe product - it's Apple. A versatile graphic designer should know video. Final Cut is the best video editing software I've used. You can learn the basics with Imovie or similar programs, but Final Cut gives you more options for editing tools and exporting formats.

Honorable Mentions:

Adobe Flash - Those animated banners at the top of the websites you visit? Those were created in Flash. Flash has moved beyond just dressing up sections of websites. Many sites are mostly Flash, and designers should be familiar with it for future career opportunities.

Adobe After Effects/Motion - After Effects is also an Adobe product - used for video editing and special effects. It has overlays, transitions and title effects that can charge up your video presentations. Motion is the Apple equivalent, and handles certain things (such as type effects) a little better than After Effects.

Apple Keynote/Powerpoint - This is a category where Adobe doesn't have a dog in the hunt. Keynote and PowerPoint are visual presentation software applications used to create presentations for seminars, small meetings, stage productions, etc. PowerPoint is widely known to most, but Keynote offers a better experience. Keynote gives you more video and animation options to add to your presentation than PowerPoint.

While this may have read like an ad for Adobe, this is simply because the company has created or acquired very good design products and offered them in bundles which gives the user focused design modules. All of the applications mentioned above will give the designer a solid foundation in their chosen craft.