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Designing A Website from Scratch – Illustrator or Photoshop?
Would you recommend Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Illustrator for a professional freelance web designer on a somewhat-low budget with a small but growing client base?
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Sign up to join this communityPossible Duplicate:
Designing A Website from Scratch – Illustrator or Photoshop?
Would you recommend Adobe Photoshop, or Adobe Illustrator for a professional freelance web designer on a somewhat-low budget with a small but growing client base?
It's like asking "hammer or saw for homebuilding?"
You need both, and likely several more tools.
Photoshop is primarily for raster Images and illustrator, vector. Both are really handy to have. But you don't necessarily need to use Adobe to supply those tools. There are many more options (the GIMP, paint.net, pixelmator, inkscape, corel, etc)
Illustrator is for print media predominately. If your focus is digital than photoshop is the better choice.
I would recommend getting both with Adobe's Switch promotion: 50% off through October 31, 2011. You can get both Photoshop Extended and Illustrator for $850, along with a bunch of other apps, including Flash. Even if you don't have a use for any of the video apps, this is still a heck of a deal and poises you for better upgrade and side-grade pricing in the future.
The Switch promo is geared towards getting disgruntled Final Cut Pro users to switch to Premiere, but you're not required to have a Final Cut Pro license.
You could also look into Adobe's subscription plans. The monthly plan makes sense as a fairly cheap way to get the software for occasional use or in the short-term until you can purchase a non-subscription license. The yearly plan will start to actually cost more than the non-subscription license (plus subsequent upgrades) after the 2nd or 3rd upgrade.