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I have used Photoshop and Illustrator a little bit and am about to spend time learning more about Graphic Design. I would like advice on what one (Windows 7 compatible) application to purchase when doing the following things:
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I think some similar questions may have already been asked: Photoshop or Illustrator OR ... Designing A Website from Scratch – Illustrator or Photoshop? There is no "one-off" program that will do everything you never need for you. Generally (and this is my opinion), Photoshop does most of everything I need. I use Photoshop for web design, graphic design ... I use it to create interfaces, etc. Illustrator is vector based and has the advantage that things can be resized as you see fit with no quality loss (which is great for some cartoonish game graphics or simple logos). But I personally find that fine-tuning gradients or adding effects and what not is easier with Photoshop. With that said, a lot of things you can do with Illustrator you can do with Photoshop and vice versa. The ideal solution is to get both, if possible, because they work well with each other and they pick up on each other's weaknesses. There are of course free alternatives as well: |
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The answer depends very much on how deeply you want to go in the world of graphic design. Since you're already familiar with Photoshop and Illustrator, you should consider one of the Adobe Creative Suite bundles. If you own a Photoshop license already, you can get a discount on an upgrade to Web Standard or Web Premium. There are two major advantages to this route: 1. The programs work extremely well together and make for a very tight workflow that gets you from start to finish more quickly than any other products out there; and 2. the web and your local bookstore are packed with learning resources at every level from beginner to advanced. There is a huge community of users to interact with, extensive tutorials on Adobe TV and from third party sites like Lynda.com, for example, which has a wide range of video tutorial courses on every program in the entire Creative Suite. A third plus is that the most recent versions (Creative Suite 5.5) have been upgraded in key areas to make web development faster and much simpler. For Logo work, Illustrator reigns supreme, but InDesign has many of the same capabilities as both Illustrator and Photoshop (code from Photoshop is actually baked right into InDesign), but is the king of layout. Since CS5 I have moved quite a lot of work from Photoshop to InDesign because it's much faster and more precise for many things that used to be the exclusive province of Photoshop. If you're on a very tight budget and not considering graphic design as a profession, consider Xara (www.xara.com). The feature set is smaller, but the programs are light and fast and may do everything you need. |
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I use Xara Designer Pro for web design. It's a bit like Adobe illustrator and Adobe Fireworks without the large footprint or pricetag. I love it for it's speed and agility (and it can use Photoshop plugins, yay!). It is a different UI though and if you already are using a lot of Adobe products it may be a bit of a learning curve. If you want to use staple products that most people in the webdesign industry are using then stick to the Adobe products Photoshop/Fireworks and/or Illustrator (for explicit vector/logo work). If you get a lot of print work I suggest you stick with Adobe products like InDesign as Xara has a few quirks in the PDF export region :) |
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Are you wanting/needing to share production files with fellow design professionals? Then yea, Adobe Suite is the way to go. If you don't need to share production files right now, then get started with much less expensive software: Inkscape = a really great open source vector illustration application (I prefer over AI for most of my work). The Gimp and/or Paint.net = two pretty good open source raster image editing apps (akin to Photoshop). |
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Photoshop and Illustrator are more then enough for what you are trying to do. I would suggest mastering those tools first instead of learning other tools. You mentioned that you are about to spend more time learning graphic design, you do not need to learn tools for this. If you really want to learn graphic design then buy a good book. Please note that I am suggesting this only after having personal freelancing experience doing web design, branding, publishing etc. |
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blender is a good bet... few people in design learn it, but if you can pick it up, that's a bonus |
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Well you're asking three different questions:
I love photoshop and illustrator but I'm not sure why people are suggesting them when you seem to indicate "What to learn next" being after photoshop and illustrator. So my advice: For online games and logo design I would focus on improving drawing abilities by hand. Beyond that I would say AutoCAD or CorelDRAW are both indespensible for doing precision illustration work and if you ever want to be able to make signage using the logos. For web design I would start with TextMate. GUI for learning web design I find to be terribly difficult because you won't get a decent foundation. To this day I still do 99% web design work in a scripting environment. Yes, I do have Dreamweaver but for a beginner you'll get lost in Dreamweaver. Start in Notepad or TextMate. (Note: TextMate is Mac only but http://stackoverflow.com/questions/82611/is-there-textmate-like-editor-for-windows will point you towards Windows alternatives. I'm on Mac so can't really say which option is best. Many are very cheap or free though.) Beyond that some other things you might want to look into is FlexSDK which will give you some game and added versatility in your webdesign. You could also look at Processing.js or Paperscript.js as visual design applications that will also help you to learn javascript at the same time. |
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