Design and graphics software resources

Reviews of a variety of design software resources and products.

The graphic design software industry is dominated by three or four companies. However, we try to feature some of the smaller graphics software companies and shareware tools and utilities, as well as the mainstream applications, from Adobe, Quark and Macromedia. Please keep checking back, as we add more and more design software resources to this section regularly. Also worth checking out, is our reviews of 3D design software.

The major design software companies.

Adobe produce some of the mainstays of the graphic design industry. Photoshop is the design standard for image manipulation and photographic work. There have been some rivals over the years, such as Macromedia's xRes, but they didn't last for long. Photoshop was just too strong a product.

Recently, InDesign has been the challenger to QuarkXpress for the title of industry standard page layout package - the battle is still continuing, with QuarkXpress version 6.5 making a strong comeback. Adobe's other main program is Illustrator. Rivals to Adobe Illustrator include Macromedia Freehand and, probably to a lesser degree, Corel's Draw. Adobe also produce a variety of web, multimedia and digital video software products, such as Live Motion, Premier and After Effects.

Adobe graphic design software product line can be found here.

Macromedia are famously responsible for Flash, the product that changed the way that animation and moving graphics was presented on the web. Just as well know is Dreamweaver, which is probably the web site design standard for WYSIWYG web development.

Macromedia web design software product descriptions can be found here.

Quark are famous for, well to be frank, Quark are famous for one product alone - QuarkXpress. It's a product that revolutionized what became the desk-top publishing industry. Version 6, now released for Mac OS X and Windows, is gradually trying to recoup some of the ground lost to Adobe's InDesign. QuarkXpress version 6.5 has now been released to much acclaim.

A very useful corner of the web

Massimocorner.com

An outstanding site for all web designers who use Macromedia Dreamweaver or Fireworks. Massimo produces some of the best objects and behaviors for these products available anywhere. Not only that, they are all free.

Extensis

Extensis

Extensis is the home of a number of creative software products and add-ons. The most famous of which is probably. Suitcase. But they also produce a number of other products that are used by designers, in particular Photoshop and QuarkXpress plug-ins.

We all love Quark

QuarkXpress forums

OK. So maybe we don't always love them. But they are helpfully running their own forums now and it is a great place to pick up tips about the product, find solutions and exchange information with other users. We particularly like this long, but very informative, thread about QuarkXpress issues with network servers .