Adobe Pueblo: The Design Suite of the Future

This is the direction progams are going.

With every new generation (6, 8, X, CS, MX, CS2, etc) the lines between what one program or another can do become blurred. Since Adobe has bought out Macromedia and is now the hog of design program companies everywhere (Quark, you can burn in hell), lets use it as an example.

Illustrator is a vector-based graphics program. You can use it for illustrations and logos and such things that need to be resized without becoming pixelated or losing quality. Photoshop is for digital imaging, like doctoring photos to take off that pimple on your nose, or making multilayered artwork with special effects, drop shadows, etc. InDesign is for page layout and allows you to import various photoshop and illustrator files and lay them out with text for a magazine, newsletter, flyer, poster, etc. These are very simplified descriptions, but they work for our purposes.

So, Photoshop is mostly for photos and images, BUT you can make text in it (useful if you want some cheesy effects like drop shadows) and Illustrator also allows you to use type (which makes sense considering type is vector-based) but it also allows you to import rasterized images (photoshop files) or actually rasterize artwork within it. In other words, if you wanted, you could make Illustrator work as a layout program instead of using InDesign. Conversely, InDesign and Photoshop also both allow you to make some vector-based illustration, so you could use them to a limited extent as a replacement for Illustrator. This is great for people who really only need to adjust their photos, but occasionally might like to add a caption or make a poster out of them. They only have to buy one program. For designers though, who need all of these capabilities, the overlap is useful for working on files from one program to another, but much of the overlap is redundant.

What this all boils down to are two different points. First, Adobe's programs have a lot of overlap, and this overlap has been growing with each successive version. Secondly, at what point will the overlap stop growing? When will we have—instead of a suite of programs—one huge, mega, multipurpose program? The trend suggests that someday this will happen. Still, it seems like poor marketing since, in order to make any money, the program would have to be extremely expensive, and people who only need one aspect of the program's abilities would be unable to justify the cost. So, part of me doubts that this “one program for everything” theory will ever come true. But even so...wouldn't it be freakin’ awesome?

Can you imagine a progam that allows you to do everything from designing logos to laying out a book to editing photographs to making webpages to building animated games? No more “make the logo in illustrator, the background in photoshop, layout the elements and type in QuarkXPress” or “make a layout, cut it apart and export it for web in photoshop, code it all in dreamweaver, add animated intro in flash.” No more computer crashing because you need five programs running in order to do all the steps without opening and closing programs fifty times.

And this is why my friend, neowolf, and I, dream that someday there will be an Adobe Pueblo, a house for all programs. (I'm sorry Quark, you're not invited.) Neither of us will be able to afford it, but wouldn't it be beautiful?