Adobe/Macromedia Merger: What It Means for Print Designers

Macromedia is no longer, Adobe is already promoting its new bundles. Some programs might cease to exist, others might be repurposed, but how does all this affect the print designer?

As of last Saturday Adobe and Macromedia have become one, both under the Adobe’s banner. Two new bundles are being marketed, the Design Bundle and the Web Bundle, with a third one still in the making, the Video Bundle. Questions arise about what will happen with GoLive, Fireworks, Director, but all in all, this big change doesn’t seem to affect print designers very much. Products like InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator are already established in the field of print and Adobe has to simply keep improving those programs as it’s already doing to keep them on the top.

The New Bundles

Currently, two new bundles have been released–the Adobe Design Bundle and the Adobe Web Bundle. The Adobe Design Bundle is simply the Creative Suite 2 Premium plus Macromedia Flash 8. You will in fact find these programs:

• Adobe Photoshop CS2
• Adobe Illustrator CS2
• Adobe InDesign CS2
• Adobe GoLive CS2
• Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional
• Version Cue CS2
• Adobe Bridge
• Adobe Stock Photos
• Flash Professional 8

The Adobe Web Bundle is a merge of the Adobe Creative Suite 2 Premium and Macrmedia Studio 8, thus by acquiring the Adobe Web Bundle you will get:

• Adobe Photoshop CS2
• Adobe Illustrator CS2
• Adobe InDesign CS2
• Adobe GoLive CS2
• Adobe Acrobat 7.0 Professional
• Version Cue CS2
• Adobe Bridge
• Adobe Stock Photos
• Dreamweaver 8
• Flash Professional 8
• Fireworks 8
• Contribute 3
• FlashPaper 2

It’s interesting that nor Golive or Fireworks have left the scenes yet, while there is no mention of Freehand nor of Director. Talking about the destiny of Director, Adobe at the moment is emphasizing the use of After Effects with Macromedia Flash, so I think we will very likely see these two in the Video Bundle possibly with Adobe Premier, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Audition and Adobe Encore DVD. The problem is that the current Adobe Video Collection is only for Windows platforms, while Macromedia Director runs also on Mac OS X.

The Bottom Line

The new bundles seem to indicate no big change for the Print Designer or the Desktop Publisher. Or is there a change? The world of design has become more and more specialized and at the same time designers have had to become less specialists. It isn’t uncommon for a Print Designer or Desktop Publisher to land web design projects. While it might unlikely for the Print Designer to have to engage in expert video editing, there are things about animation that he/she will have to learn depending on the requirements of the web design job. Having a platform from which one can create both print and web content has become essential. Do these bundles handle this need? Despite Adobe’s clever marketing, the answer is: “At the moment not fully”.

Adobe certainly hasn’t had the time to integrate the Macromedia products with the Creative Suite. They are sold together, but even the prices are very close to what they would be if bought separately. However Adobe had to start selling those products as their own, which now they are, and the quickest way to do that is to create the bundles we see now. This is Adobe’s quick and first move after the new change. This explains why GoLive is still being sold together with Dreamweaver in the Web Bundle. As for the Design Bundle the only Macromedia product is Flash 8 Professional, so getting rid of GoLive is not a good move, yet. It is very likely that GoLive will go out of the scenes or will be repurposed for Mobile Content Publishing, but we can’t see this right now, at a few days from the completion of the merge between Adobe and Macromedia. I am still expecting to see a Mobile Publishing Bundle that has not even mentioned by Adobe.

Many more questions rise, such as whether the Creative Suite will remain fundamentally separated from Studio 8, even if sold together as a bundle, or whether Dreamweaver will take GoLive’s place in the Creative Suite, while Flash and Acrobat will be merged together. With Adobe wanting to unite Flash Player and Acrobat Reader into one program, it would be no surprise if their professional editions would also be merged into one. Note once again that the Design Bundle is simply the Creative Suite 2 Premium with the addition of Flash 8.

Enough about the bundles, what about Creative Suite 3? Is Adobe even a little concerned by the release of QuarkXPress 7, considering a recent survey showing that someone outside of Adobe knew about these bundles prior to their release? We will most likely have the new combined Adobe “AcroFlash” in CS3, while we might soon see the appearance “DreamLive Cs3″. While I am not being serious about the names of the programs I just mentioned, certainly those waiting for the third of Adobe’s Creative Suites have a lot to look forward to. One word of warning to Quark: with all these new possibilities now open to Adobe, the release of QuarkXPress 7 has to be as timely as possible now more than ever. Watch for who will cry like a baby.

Will Adobe Conquer the World?

Print design, illustration, photo retouching and editing, PDF technology, web design, Flash technology, video making and editing and even mobile publishing. Adobe seems to have it all. But silently in a little corner there is a small company that just happens to own everything else in the world of software: Microsoft. The fights between the two giants will come, especially within the mobile content world. Microsoft so far hasn’t shown much interest in the rest of the design fields, such as print or web design for example, but they won’t let go of the ever developing mobile culture, possibly the hottest and fastest developing market at the moment. And you think the iPod is being sold in avalanches. Shall we make a count of how many people have mobile phones and how many have Apple’s world famous mp3 player?

All these changes seem might seem dazzling. Hopefully Adobe will see that and will try to meet the needs of their customers, as now more then ever, they have the tools to do so. The skill is to put the designers in control of these tools and not the tools in control of the designers.

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