Flash, quark, photoshop, indesign, illustrator....?

I am looking to gain more c.a.d skills as like EVERY job I see requires full working knowledge of these skills.





The problem is, I dont know which does what, what the packages do or what they are used for. I figure if I know a bit more about each- at the minimum, what they are used for, then I could attend a class or two which in my past history of learning photoshop, exist of a class where you come in and the tutor helps you to work on a project. But if I dont know what the package can do, how can I hope to gain anything from a class like this! let alone decide on what choice to make.





I live in London and the courses I am talking have been at several colleges around london.

Flash, quark, photoshop, indesign, illustrator....?
These are all design packages but they do completely different things.





Photoshop is for dealing with photos, as the name implies. It can be used for everything from simple cropping and scaling, right up to sophisticated retouching - eg when you want to remove someone from a photo or add something in. It's the industry standard for this type of work.





Illustrator is for making graphics - logos, charts, infographics for newspapers, etc. Again it's pretty much the industry standard, although there are competitors, Freehand and to a lesser extend Corel Draw.





Quark and InDesign are for the same thing: what's known as desktop publishing. They allow you to take text, photos and graphics and put them together into a newspaper or magazine. Quark is the older package which used to be the standard, but failed to innovate for a long time which allowed the newer InDesign to come up and take away a lot of customers. Both of these are still very widely used in all magazines and newspapers around the world.





Flash is for web work - it designs things like the moving banner adverts you see on websites these days, although it can also do more complex things like games.





If you want to do web work though, you will need to know something like Dreamweaver for general web design and layout. You'll really also need to know the underlying languages of web pages - HTML, CSS and probably Javascript.





By the way, these aren't really CAD. CAD, computer aided design, is really for engineering and that sort of thing - drawing blueprints etc. Much more complicated and technical, not really "design" at all. It uses packages like AutoCAD.





It's definitely worth doing a course at a reputable college. However I think you should work out first whether it's web or print design you want to learn - they're different skills and involve different packages, as I outline above, although probably Photoshop will feature in both.





Good luck!
Reply:Quark on the Mac is the de facto standard programme for publishing.
Reply:Flash is a web design application, all the rest are used to prepare and manipulate images with the exception of quark, which is used in publishing, advertising etc, to produce documents (magazines etc).
Reply:Flash is a programming program/language that peoduces animations for web pages. You'd only need this skill if doing work on websites.


Quark, Illustrator and Photoshop are design tools, and what most companies will use them for would be graphics for web sites, creating logos, promotions, conferences and if you knew these packages you could command a princely salary in the graphics team of many many institutions - as a Graphic Designer.





However, the first step for many is Desktop Publishing, and all that requires you to do is to master Microsoft Office, which is Word, Powerpoint and Excel. Investment banks are always looking for them and it might be a good step to gaining more training.
Reply:Flash is a program that lets u make flash file for websites. Flash on the web can be games, animations, and other things of the like.


Illustrator is for graphicial design. Other than that i don not know much about it.


Photoshop is for editiong pictures. Adobe is the devolper for photoshop.


As for quark and indesign I do not know what they are about and I have never heard of them. Sorry I could not help more.
Reply:With regards to the answerer above, I work in a publishing company and we actually all use InDesign (but they're both very similar, anyway).





I am learning HTML and CSS at the moment. There are A LOT of very good tutorial websites out there to help you (so you can save a few quid by not buying a book!).
Reply:Most of them are adobe and adobe have a great site with "loads of how to do's" and down-loadable training and best of all it's FREE.





adobe.com





CAD is computer aided design and is mainly used for engineering design,building design,the products that you have listed are more graphical products for serious colour work with electronic artwork.





There are some great books which I use like "how to cheat in photoshop" which gives you easy to follow instructions to achieve you goal.





A good way to learn the products you mention is to try modifying some digital photo's,try photoshop elements first as this is a light version and gets bundled with most scanners.





Quark is a tricky program and is used with Macs,some problems with OSX and Quark.





Flash is for animations in web design,I use Dreamweaver and Fireworks as it is easy to use and give better results.





Courses are OK but if you have not got a working project they can be expensive and out of date ever so quickly.





Go play and get a feel for a product BEFORE courses as that way you will be more aware of what the trainer is trying to get you to do and you will ask more questions,hence get a lot more out of the course.