Prologue

Adobe software has always been highly respected for creative design and development. Adobe creates programs that allow you to produce amazing designs and creations with ease. The Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5) Design Premium is the company’s latest release of sophisticated and professional level software that bundles many separate programs as a suite. Each program in the suite works individually, or you can integrate the programs by using Version Cue, the Adobe work management software that helps keep track of revisions and edits, and Adobe Bridge, an independent program that helps you control file management with thumbnails and metadata and other organizational tools.

You can use the Adobe CS5 Design Premium programs to create a wide range of products, from illustrations, page layouts, and professional documents to Web sites and photographic manipulations. Integrating the CS5 programs extends the possibilities for you as a designer. Don’t worry about the programs being too difficult to figure out — just come up with your ideas and start creating!

Adobe Creative Suite 5 Design Premium All-in-One For Dummies is written in a thorough and fun way to show you the basic steps of how to use each program included in the suite. You find out how to use each program individually and how to work with the programs together, letting you extend your projects even further. You find out just how easy it is to use the programs by following simple steps so that you can discover the power of the Adobe software. You’ll be up and running in no time!

Here are some things you can do with this blog:

✦ Create page layouts using text, drawings, and images in InDesign.

✦ Make illustrations using drawing tools with Illustrator.

✦ Manipulate photographs using filters and drawing or color correction tools with Photoshop.

✦ Create PDF (Portable Document Format) documents with Adobe Acrobat or other programs.

✦ Create Web pages and put them online with Dreamweaver.

✦ Create animations and videos with Flash.

✦ Create Web images, rollovers, image maps, and slices with Fireworks.

You discover the basics of how to create all these different kinds of things throughout the chapters in this blog in fun, hands-on examples and clear explanations, getting you up to speed quickly!

Adobe CS5 Design Premium is available for both Windows and the Macintosh. We cover both platforms in this blog. Where the keys you need to press or the menu choice you need to make differs between Windows and the Mac, we let you know by including instructions for both platforms. For example:

✦ Press the Alt (Windows) or Option (Mac) key.

✦ Choose Edit➪Preferences➪General (Windows) or InDesign➪Preferences➪General (Mac).

The programs in Design Premium Suite often require you to press and hold down a key (or keys) on the keyboard and then click or drag with the mouse. For brevity’s sake, we shorten this action by naming the key you need to hold down and adding a click or drag, like this:

✦ Shift-click to select multiple files.

✦ Move the object by Ctrl-dragging (Windows) or Ô-dragging (Mac). 

Here are the formatting conventions used in this blog:

✦ Bold: We use bold to indicate when you should type something or to highlight an action in a step list. For example, the action required to open a dialog box would appear in bold in a step list.

✦ Code font: We use this computerese font to show you Web addresses (URLs), e-mail addresses, and bits of HTML code. For example, you type a URL into a browser window to access a Web page, such as www. google.com.

✦ Italics: We use italics to highlight a new term, which we then define. For example, filters may be a new term to you. The word itself is italicized and is followed by a definition to explain what the word means.