As wonderful a tool as Illustrator is, the entire Creative Suite of products shows that it’s just one in an entire, complete tool kit. We’re going to go through broad integration between Adobe Illustrator, and its suite mates in the Design Package – InDesign, Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver and Acrobat.
Each of these programs was developed independently to handle specific job tasks that a print and multimedia design house might encounter. Two of the applications (Dreamweaver and Flash) were acquired by Adobe when it acquired Macromedia Software in 2005. Each does something a bit different; Illustrator is good for line drawings on a canvas of arbitrary size, Photoshop is good for photo manipulation and ‘pixel painting’, Flash and Dreamweaver are used to make interactive animations and web sites, and InDesign is designed to assemble and lay out books, while Acrobat performs a similar function for smaller, multi-page PDFs.
What makes these software packages inter-operate is that the majority of them (other than Dreamweaver and Photoshop) are all built off of, essentially, the same file format: Postscript. Postscript files are text files with additional information describing the mathematics needed to raw curves, splines, lines and fill information. The reference definition of Postscript is what underlies every laser printer and most ink jet printers out there, and is also what drives the Macintosh screen display. Adobe originally developed Postscript and has several extensions on it defining how it works.
Macromedia software also developed extensions on the language, and those got rolled into Shockwave and Flash file formats.
When using these software tools together, one of the things you’ll notice is that all of them can import one another’s formats – Illustrator can import and export Flash, Flash can import Illustrator files, Photoshop can import Illustrator files and keep some of the layering information and editibility intact, and Illustrator can import Photoshop files.
The master of file interoperability in the suite is InDesign, which imports native Photoshop and Illustrator files as editable objects; you can right click on them and select Edit Original, and have them launch in Photoshop and Illustrator respectively, make your change on the original, and have the changes propagate through the importation link in Illustrator.
On top of this, all of the Adobe software contains a lot of common user interface elements; most of them enable layer manipulation (notable exceptions are Acrobat) and offer free floating tool bars that have buttons to switch which tool you’re using at a particular time – from a drawing pen to an eraser, to a magic lasso tool. Where feasible, when two programs have tools that do similar functions, the icons for those tools will look the same. They don’t quite integrate down to perfect congruence on keyboard shortcuts. For example, InDesign uses Ctrl-F to pull up a find and replace tool, Illustrator uses Ctrl-F as “Paste In Front”, which is Ctrl-Alt-Shift-V in InDesign.
Even so, if you know how to use one of these powerful tools, you’ve got about 50-70% of the user interface for the others already learned…and as Adobe releases new versions, the tool and command integration improves.
Your designs can be award winning creative masterpieces that don’t have to take forever to create when you know how to use the right tools effectively from an expert professional user. Learn more about the Adobe Illustrator through our Adobe Illustrator CS5 Classes.
