What

Applications

Do

What?

The Basic Overview

What does What ?

Once you get into computer graphics, you'll hear about all kinds of applications that do all kinds of things.   This page is developed to give you an understanding of what various applications do what.   I find that when I'm working on a project, I need images, brochures, a newsletter, a PowerPoint presentation, a poster, and a DVD for my one, single project.

So what software do I need to get my product and my marketing materials all together.   The page you are reading is here to help straighten all of that out in your head.   Hopefully, if you know what does what, you won't waist money duplicating purchases, and when other designers or coworkers are talking shop, you'll know what the heck is going on.  

Graphic design applications are basically broken down into a few categories.   The first two considerations are, "Is your project for print, or web."   When I say web, what I really mean is monitor based publishing.   This means that you are going to see your work on a computer screen, and television, or a big screen projector.   So as you read through this paper, whenever I say "web based", I mean monitor based.

Beyond print and web, here are the various categories that I can think of that various applications would fit into;

Image Manipulation

Vector Graphics

Page Layout

Web sight development

Presentation Software

Video Editing

DVD Production

Animation and Interactivity

That's all of the categories that I can think of right now, so let's move ahead.   I'm only going to mention the professional software versions.   If your cousin Jim next door just made a new paint program in his computer class, you're not going to hear about it here.

Image Manipulation.

I believe that this is where it all starts.   Images.   No matter what type of design you are doing, you are going to manipulate some images.   You might change the content of the images, crop, resize, touchup, falsify, fade in, fade out, get rid of the mother in law, and/or whatever.   Anything that you are going to do to change an image will get done in an image manipulation application.

There are three big players in image manipulation;

PhotoShop (Adobe)

FireWorks (MacroMedia, soon to be a part of Adobe)

Corel(owned by Corel )

Almost everything you see in print or web has gone through PhotoShop.   It is the king of image manipulation.   With PhotoShop you can make anything look real.   Anything.

Photoshop comes bundled with a program called, "ImageReady."   ImageReady helps your create animated gif, web site rollover effects, image maps and more.   Most people that own PhotoShop use less than 10 percent of it's powerful tools.   I love PhotoShop.

Fireworks is a super image manipulation application.   The thing is, if you open the program, many of the icons, the tool bar, the panels and many of the options in the drop down menus look just like options in PhotoShop.   It kind of looks like somebody copied the other persons application.   Not that this is what happened, but they do look very much alike.

I own both programs.   I prefer PhotoShop, though I think I'm biased because I've been using it for 12 or more years.   Fireworks is super wonderful, and in some ways, I like it better than PhotoShop.   I spend at least 2 hours a day in PhotoShop.

Posters, Brochures, Business cards and Vectors.

To Create posters, brochures, business cards, stationary, coffee cup mug design, cereal boxes, candy wrappers, orange juice half gallon jugs, StarBuck's cups, McDonald's Cheeseburger wrappers, or anything else you see in print, most designers are going to use vectorized programs to make these things come to life.   We cover, "what is a vector?" in our page, "Computer Art 101."   Vectors are wonderful because they print extremely well, and you can scale them up to make them large, or scale them down to make them small, and there is no distortion.

Adobe Illustrator is the King of Vector Programs, hands down.   In Adobe Illustrator, you can create a 12 foot, by 12 foot document.   If I'm going to make anything that is going to be printed, I'm doing it in Illustrator.

Anything that you create in Illustrator, and text you use, will come out great.   The thing is, Illustrator is hard to learn.   It is not an intuitive program at all.   This is because that vectors use control points called paths and anchor points.   To someone new, they are hard to understand, find, and control.   That's another story.

If you are making a poster, you would make your logo, artwork and text in Illustrator.   You would still manipulate your images in PhotoShop, and then, "place" them into Illustrator.   In a perfect world, you would drop the image in Illustrator as a Tiff file at 300 dpi.

Page Layout Programs

What if I'm going to make a magazine, newspaper, book or maybe a multipage menu for a restaurant.   In that case, I need a page layout program.

Here is how a good page layout program works.   Let's say you have a 50 page magazine article with 60 pictures.   What you would do is take your text, and drop it into the 50 page document.   Then, you drop in your pictures.   In a good page layout program, the text moves to make room for the pictures.   And if you get rid of a picture on page one, the text in all 50 pages adjust for the change that you made on page 1.   Page Layout programs are lots of fun and very helpful.

The big players in page layout are;

Quark Express

Page Maker (Adobe)

Indesign (Adobe)

Publisher (MicroSoft)

The Queen of Page Layout is Quark Express, owned by Quark Express.   70% of people that do page layout use Quark.   Quark is very full of itself.   That's all I have to say.

Adobe said that it was going to stop making PageMaker in version 6.5.   They were introducing Indesign.   When Indesign came out, the printers didn't like it.   Printing with Indesign cased problems.   So Adobe came out with version 7 of PageMaker and reworked Indesign.   Now Indesign is King.   It may not be the most used, but it is the best product.   It retails for about $1200.00 ( of course if you shop smart, you can find it for a fraction of that price).

Finally there is MicroSoft Publisher.   It is very easy to use.   Most printers don't want your stuff handed to them in Publisher, but the product is great for community newsletters, church programs, stuff like that.   It is very easy to use and fun (and cheaper than the other three).

So Much for Print, Let's Move on to Web Design

To make a website, the big three softwares are;

DreamWeaver (MacroMedia)

Frontpage (MicroSoft)

Go Live ( Adobe)

Netscape Composer (Netscape)

Most web developers use DreamWeaver.   It is a super tool.   It will write your html, css, javascript and create your forms.   It is the best.  

Frontpage is known for writing lots of code that you don't need. Go live is great, but I have never met a person that uses it.

I listed Netscape Composer basically because it is free.   It's not a bad product for free.   I teach a lot of people, "Intro do web design," and if they don't have any software to make web pages, and if they don't want to learn html, I show them Composer.

If you are going to do webpages,
take an html, css and javascript class.

Presentation Software

Presentation Software is for people that are going to make a show for a large group of people, and plug that presentation into a video projector so that everyone can see it.   The King of Presentation software is, "PowerPoint."   Powerpoint is easy to use.

Personally, I don't like PowerPoint.   My motto is, "PowerPoint is for lossers!"   If I'm going to make an out of this world presentation, I'm going to use Flash.   The thing about Flash is that the learning curve is Vast, but it you want a great presentation, this is the software of choice.

Video Editing Software.

Video editing is in a new and revolutionary stage.   I've been editing video using computers since 1995.   Computers really weren't ready to edit video affordably until right now.    Right now, if you have a fast computer and a lot of storage memory, you can create video segments just like anything you see on TV.   And, it works well.   Until this year, unless you put tens of thousands of dollars into a lot of software and hardware, your results were going to be unreliable.

I would say that the most popular video editing programs are;

IMovie (apple. Not the best, but easy to use.)

Adobe Premiere (Adobe)

Final Cut Pro (Apple)

Studio Version 9 (Pinnacle Systems)

Let's Talk About I Movie

I movie is simple to use, but not very robust.   You can only work with one video track (maybe two, but I don't think so).   I know some people that video weddings and this is the software that they use.   If they tell me that they use IMovie, I think to myself (you're not using the right software).   Whatever.

Adobe Premiere.

Premiere used to be available for the Mac and the PC.   Adobe decided only to make this software available for the PC in it's newest version, Adobe Premiere Pro.

Premiere is great!   Fantabulous! You can add 99 tracks of video, 99 tracks of sound and you can make anything look real.   If you want to put yourself on the Alps, skiing, then Adobe Premiere can make that happen.  

I love Adobe Premiere.   It's expensive.

Final Cut Pro.

Final Cut Pro, and Apple software, is as fantabulous as Premiere.   It is only available for the Mac.   It can do as much, if not more than Premiere.   I love both.   I own both.   It is also expensive.

Studio Version 9

I came upon Studio 9 (a Pinnacle Product) by accident, but I own it.   What I like about it is that it is very easy to use, and it lets you create DVDs with the menus you see when you go to Blockbuster and rent a DVD.   It's amazing.   What I also like about Studio is that they have a great help menu, and the book that comes with it walks you through the process of how to use the software in a way that is very easy to understand.

Animation and Interactivity

Flash

Poser

Director

My favorite program in the World is MacroMedia's Flash.   Learning Flash can be quite complex, but you can do almost anything with it.   You can develop presentations, websites, portions of web sites, games, or full length feature, animated cartoons.

You can import about anything into Flash.   You can drop in images of almost any file format, video clips, sounds and more.

It is generally a 2D program.

Poser (Curious Labs)

I am presently taking on of my books to animation.   I will animate it in Flash, then I'll take the Flash animation and burn it to DVD for distribution.   My problem is that I need some models for people.   What that means is that when I need a person in a particular pose, then I could pay a model to come in, or , I could use a software program that will create a model for me.   That is where Poser comes in.

Poser Creates 3D complex models that you can view, from any angle, distance or perspective.   You can make the model look like any body you want it to. For instance, if you wanted to make a model that looked just like your Grandmother, you would do it in Poser (the learning curve is vasttttttttttttt).

Taking that to another level, you could then animate Your Grandmother and make her run down a picture of a beach that you took with your camera in California.

What can I say?   Awesome!

Summary

If you are creating, or learning to create graphic design,   computer art ,   or maybe "Digital Media" is the term that we should use, then it's a good thing to understand what application does what.   There are so many and they are so expensive

  If you have questions or comments, then please email me.

I teach html, DreamWeaver, Photoshop, Flash and Fireworks.   I do it via web conferencing which means that you can be anywhere on the planet, and you and I can connect live, in real time on the net, and you can start learning.

So best wishes to you in your internet development lives.

Bill Dallas Lewis | Author/Computer Illustrator/Animator