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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Pacio49" data-source="post: 2018400" data-attributes="member: 28472">Professional DesignerOne of the perks of being a gamer and a professional designer is the access to the toys after working hours.  <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f60e.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":cool:" title="Cool    :cool:"  data-smilie="6"data-shortname=":cool:" /> The stuff I actually use often, at home and at work, on Macs:- Illustrator 10 :  The symbols features are powerful, if a trifle unwieldy and with a bit of a learning curve. However, once you start to practice with them, they make certain tasks much easier to deal with.  Also, once you get the whole idea down of making patterns and fills properly you can create some seamless floor tile designs for miniatures maps.-Photoshop 7.0 : Industry standard, can't go wrong here. Cost can be prohibitive for independent licensed copies, but enterprising folks always seem to get their hands on copies of it somehow. For those interested in it as a business investment which should therefore stay on the up & up, try finding someone in college who's willing to purchase an educational copy of it with their student ID for you.- MS Word : 2004 just installed at work, 'X' installed at home.  Here's a tip for folks who find themselves easily sidetracked when it comes to getting stuff done on the computer re: D&D planning.  Do the work in stages. If you try writing in Quark or InDesign, you'll invariably stop your writing to worry about how the formatting looks, and how the layout is coming along. Don't write in the layout program. Write in the word processor and focus only on the writing task.  Then, when the initial draft is done, import the text into the layout program and spend time making it pretty.  Even if you don't quite get around to finishing the layout, you've still got the document finished in the word processor.Other programs I have access to/use occasionally when time permits:-Painter 9 : With the Wacom tablet, this one is fun but I don't usually have enough time to play with it to its full extent. On the list of things to learn by messing around.-Quark 6.0 :  Industry standard, but speaking as a print professional I have serious issues with Quark's performance and lack of customer support.  The only reason it's still around is because it was the first on the scene.- Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop) :  InDesign is fun and my preferred layout program. However, I'm still self-training on it since work favors Quark when we get documents in. Even in CS I dislike the counter-intuitive nature of flowing text in, but that's just an old dog complaining at new tricks.  If you are using Illustrator CS, be aware that there are backwards compatibility issues with regards to their type engine.  Up until CS, you could save files down with a minimum of problems (since many of the worlds printers don't quite fully support CS yet) but after CS you run into issues with your text blocks being chopped up upon saving down.  Photoshop CS is much better, but if you use nested layer sets, opening the layered file in older versions of Photoshop does some random damage and flattening as those nested layer sets freak the older version out somewhat. And that's what I use.</blockquote>

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