Photoshop, Illustrator, or ???

Hello everyone!

Since I'm running a Powermac G5 PPC with Leopard 10.5.8, I was wondering what would be a easy to learn program for designing flyers, banners and other promotional items?

I've used Photoshop in the past, when I used to use a PC. But now that I've made the switch, I'm looking for some good advice. Any suggestions?

Thanks in advance!

You can still use Photoshop and Illustrator but given hardware constraints, you'll be limited to an older version. Take a look at the requirements for the various versions of Photoshop here to see what version will work for you. Illustrator requirements here.

Great! Thanks

You might also want to take a look at the older versions of iWork, specifically Pages. For standard promotional forms (business cards, posters, pamphlets et al) it's really hard to beat and completely revolutionized my use of InDesign (which I now use only for more complex jobs).

G'day

Photoshop should really be your LAST resort if you're creating stuff for a commercial printer. Not only will your files be unnecessarily large (or, alternatively, too low in resolution to get a good result) but you'll really be making your printer work way too hard.

You can get away with doing this sort of stuff in Illustrator but, again, it's not ideal.

Do yourself a favour and learn InDesign — you'll be thankful for it in no time at all.

The rule of thumb is easy — use programs for what they were developed to do. Using Photoshop as a page layout program is like using a sedan as a bulldozer.

m.

keynote

I vote for IWork - Keynote especially can help you get started. It's very intuitive and exports to pdf or doc. It has some nice templates as well.

Poster design

Benedictine said:

I vote for IWork - Keynote especially can help you get started. It's very intuitive and exports to pdf or doc. It has some nice templates as well.

Click to expand...

Agree that Keynote is an easy solution for building posters. Pro's can add more sophistication in illustrator.

A couple of free alternatives:
Inkscape. Draw Freely.
Cenon - Graphics Software with Style