Adobe CS3 Design Collections Empowers Print and Web Creatives

New Design Collections in the Adobe® Creative Suite 3® range offer improved stalwarts and powerful new tools to enable creation for the print and the mobile world

The new range of the Adobe® Creative Suite 3® family is showing its growth. Now more than merely Creative Suite Standard and Pro, it has blossomed into a rather formidable array of packages aiming to appeal to and satisfy the needs of creatives in many spheres, not just print.

But that doesn’t mean that print creatives are getting left with the Miss Congenialty of the new CS3 offerings; far from it. Adobe’s “collections” approach and feedback from customers and users have produced a new take on tools for the print designer, which translate into a package that can address print design with the panache that Adobe has always had as well as give print designers strong hooks into the expanding world of web and mobile: tools that suggest powerful asset repurposing.

Introducing the Adobe CS3 Design Collections

To satsify the needs of print creatives, web creatives, and those who straddle the line, Adobe has created two collections specifically with this audience in mind.

Adobe CS3 Design Premium (photo courtsey Adobe)

The Adobe CS3 Design Premium collection is the version for designers who want to be able to catch anything that thier assignments may throw at them. Print design? No problem–you have new versions of old dependable friends: InDesign® CS3, Illustrator® CS3, and the new Photoshop® CS3 Extended. Web design? Repurpose your print access with XHTML imported straight into the newly Adobefied Dreamweaver® CS3. Need animation to illuminate your content? Adobe Flash® CS3 Professional, complete with an interface that has a decidedly Adobe outlook–the result of Adobe’s elegant integration paradigm.

Adobe CS3 Design Standard (photo courtesy Adobe)

The Adobe CS3 Design Standard collection, by contrast, collects the must-have tools for print production into one powerful place, shiny new versions of reliable tools: InDesign CS3, Photoshop CS3 Standard, and Illustrator CS3. Meant for print specialists and production environments, it provides the essentials for producing captivating content.

Both Design Premium and Design Standard get the full run of Adobe tools intended for PDF generation, efficient workflows, and collaboration: Adobe Acrobat® 8 Professional, and a new CS3 version of Adobe Bridge®, offering access to Adobe Version Cue® CS3, Adobe Stock Photos, Adobe Device Central CS3, and Adobe Acrobat Connect™.

What do I need, How Much, and When?

Adobe’s expected ship date of the CS3 Design Collections is mooted for Second Quarter of 2007 at this time, and we expect details to follow.

Prices at this point are estimated by Adobe at the levels commensurate with edition content, and there are upgrade paths available. Full new editions of CS3 Design collections are price at, for the Premium edition, US$1799, with upgrade licenses from CS or CS2 for US$599 (US$499 for CS2.3 owners) or qualifying users of Adobe point products (individual versions of InDesign or Photoshop) for US$1599. For the Standard edition, the full price is tipped at US$1199, to upgrade from an earlier CS US$399, or from an eariler point product US$899.

Both editions of the CS 3 Design Collection require Microsoft® Windows® XP or Windows Vista,™ and for the Mac version one needs Mac OS X running on either the Power PC or Intel® processor–the Mac version is a full Universal Binary, bringing Adobe onboard for the MacIntel as well as preserving the investement PowerMac users have made.

Information on preordering CS3 can be found at the Adobe website.