Which Adobe products should I be concerned with in terms of web development [closed]

Question

What Adobe products do you use or feel accomplish most of what is needed for web development.

My point here is that scripting can accomplish almost everything that Flash and the Adobe family can, but then what about graphics. Illustrator, Indesign, and of course Flash... they seem to flow over into accomplishing more than just make things look good and I'm just curious to see what people find they actually need or use.

Answer 1

You don't actually need any! TextMate or E-Texteditor and a decent browser (plus a few free tools), or (for a complete environment) Coda or Coda alternatives. But Dreamweaver and Photoshop are a good foundation; possibly Flash unless you want to go HTML5 with your media delivery etc. Depends on whether you hand-code or want a visual environment, or a bit of both. You'll probably also want to get a grip on JQuery or a similar Javascript library.

Just for graphics, Photoshop Elements will do - Photoshop is overkill, as is the GIMP - unless you're using Flash for complex interactive stuff, you only need to generate jpg, gif (animated or not) and png files. Or something free like Seashore (OS X) or alternatives. As for Adobe products, Fireworks is the one. If you want to generate original graphics programatically, try Nodebox (Python), ContextFree (C-ish) or Processing (Java-ish).

Then there's the wonderful Raphaël Javascript library, and various html canvas examples...

Answer 2

What Adobe products do you use or feel accomplish most of what is needed for web development.

None. I sold my Creative Suite a few years ago, and have never missed it for web development nor graphics.

In print production, it's hard to avoid Adobe's excellent, industry-standard products. But for the web, there are countless much cheaper alternatives for every purpose.

Answer 3

Everything seems to be moving away from browser plugins towards HTML and JavaScript so if you have not invested time and money into Flash development, don't go there.

There are excellent free alternatives for Dreamweaver. Personally I prefer Netbeans. Most of the fancy Fireworks stuff (roll-overs etc.) you can hand code very easily if you use javascript libraries such as jQuery

BUT I have tried sooo many free or cheap alternatives to get my web graphics (banners, icons, sprites etc.) and there is nothing that comes close to the quality and productivity you get with Adobe Illustrator. It simply saves you hours and hours. If you don't care about graphics quality, you can churn out some icons pretty quickly with GIMP or Paint.NET or whatever, but it is simply not as productive and stunning as THE TOOL.