In most Design Studios the "weapons of choice" are the Adobe Creative Suite range of programs. Available in Design, Web and Master Suites. Programs can also be purchased individually. They are also usually installed on a Mac computer, because Mac's rule in the Design Industry. Sorry Windows users, that's just the way it is...
Illustrator (Ai) is a Vector graphic program used for building Illustrations, Logo & Interface Designs - Wireframes + Sitemaps. Photoshop (Ps) is a Bitmap graphic program used to edit, manipulate and clean up photos. It is also used to provide Visual Effects and building Interface Designs. Fireworks (Fw) is a hybrid program that creates both Vector and Bitmap graphics, it is used for building Interfaces for Web and Screen Design.
Dreamweaver (Dw) is a visual Web Page creation program which writes HTML code for you. Flash (Fl) is used to create Animations, but can also be used to create Web Sites and CDrom Interactive presentations on Mac as .app + Windows as .exe.
Indesign (Id) is a Page Layout program used to create multi-page documents, which supports PDF workflows. Acrobat is used to create and edit PDF documents. PDF documents maintain the look and feel of a page layout by embedding the fonts into the document, they are cross-platform documents that can be viewed on Linux, Mac and Windows computer systems.
