Choosing an Adobe Platform

Adobe Field Guide

This field guide highlights the basics of Adobe Suite - primarily Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and Bridge. This brief has been assembled to work parallel with imagery and video references illuminating core topics through exercises and demonstrations. The resources contained at the end of this document provide support content, tutorials and inspiration and should be utilized as such.

A lion’s share of the industry standards for graphic design, video editing and web development is comprised of Adobe Systems products. The workflows produced by their software are heavily integrated into the training of the creative workforce today, spanning their influence over raster, vector, static and dynamic assets across all platforms.

Adobe was started by Xeroc-PARC employees who were passionate about standardizing digital printing and resolving the pressing issues of CGI at the time, such as describing fonts such that they look good at all sizes. After failing to convince management in the value of this pursuit, they left and did it themselves, and the rest is history.

Does it Move?

Overarchingly the additional spectrum that can be applied to Adobe Software is its ability or platform forte to deal with static or dynamic content. Primer, Flash and Aftereffects in this aspect would define one end of the spectrum while Illustrator and Indesign would occupy the opposing end. This distinction specifically denotes content creation as opposed to management tools

Choosing the Right Tool

The benefits of Adobe Software is ironically where confusion can potentially occur. At once each software platform has a forte, a privilege set of criteria from its workspace/interface design, its management, tools, asset handling, etc., there is also a high degree of overlap and commonality amongst each software package.

This aspect makes file and asset compatibility across Adobe Software simple, easy and enjoyable to work with, while also allowing for minor adjustment to be made locally rather than through an assets native, or prefered, software platform - i.e. line art or vector content can be made within Photoshop even though this software platform privileges raster content. The confusion can occur when a user silo’s any one software package within Adobe Systems/Suite rather than understanding that each and every software package is meant to work seamlessly with each other and content creation should be done relative to type and platform compatibility.

Platform Specific Guides

We will focus on core Adobe software platforms of:Illustrator, Photoshop, Indesign and Bridge, approaching them through the criteria defined above and respective of their forte’s of Vector (Illustrator), Raster (Photoshop), Collating (Indesign), Managing (Bridge).