I use all of those softwares together for presentation boards and portfolios.

yeah, mainly for that, any presentation (from conceptual to final, from printed to projections, multimedia, etc), and yes, for portfolios, webpage designs, etc...

According to the adobes description, Photoshop is used for pictures, Illustrator could be used for CAD and InDesing is used for webpages. To complete the presentation, Pagemaker is what you use to put everything together. I'm not sure if architects use these softwares exactly they way they are meant for.

Actually, Pete. InDesign was created as a redeisgned upgrade for PageMaker. It is supposed to be as powerful as QuarkXpress, the current publishing software of the pros.

ON A TANGENT, I AM BUYING A NEW DESKTOP FOR HOME USE, AND GEARING UP TO MAKE A PORTFOLIO FOR GRAD SCHOOL APPLICATIONS. AND RECOMMENDATION OR WARNINGS FOR BUYING A NEW PC? ALSO, IM A LITTLE NERVOUS ABOUT SWITCHING TO MAC B/C I USE AND LIKE ACAD AND HEARD THE EMULATOR REALLY SLOWS YOU DOWN.

archetecton, please stop yelling.

A lot of schools (i.e. the ones you are planning on applying to) give recommendations to what their computer requirements are for new students. This will be a good starting point.

If you're not already a mac user, don't bother switching. Mac's are great and easy to use, but they don't have autoCad or max/viz. Though there are mac alternatives, you'll find it easier to get a job out of school if you have autoCad experience.

sorry for the yelling. i am writing a lot of construction notes and i tend to use all caps for that :)

thanks for the reply. i have a ton of acad experience, which, as you point out, has made me employable. the tip about computer requirements is a good one.

We just bought a Dell Dimension 4600 and it seems to be working well... did a lot of research on what we wanted and needed and they seemed to have a good balance of components, software and service package (we got a one year full service deal). I think it was around $900 with a keyboard and mouse (XP pro, service package, no monitor). We don't do a lot of rendering but we do use Autocad, Illustrator etc. and it's pretty fast so far.

thanks! i have a dell now, though a bit older and running 98. it acted fine until the warranty ran out, then i started developing lots of startup and runtime errors. i called up an on-site repair service, and they told me to trash the computer b/c of the win 98 op system. they said it was terribly unstable and they did not feel good about taking my money to repair it. im nervous about going back to dell automatically.

i was looking at ibm for a comparison and i also want to know if anyone who does a lot of modeling/rendering can recommend a fast machine.

We use PhotoShop for photos and graphics that appear in our CAD drawings (often this is signage in elevations, maps and renderings on cover sheets, etc.), for cropping and scaling underlays that we use to draw over and build 3D models over, and a variety of other tasks on a daily basis.
We have InDesign and Illustrator but they get much less use. We have some standard templates for different sizes of presentation boards that we modify as needed, and we create labels, CD covers, and other graphic design projects in them.

Indesign is for page layouts. You are thinking of Golive for web design.

Pagemaker is ancient and not worth learning (although I did my portfolio for grad school with it many years ago).

Ormolu,

So, basically you can use Photoshop to do most things? Is good to know what software a newcomer needs to master.

I'm currently using PageMaker and was unaware the Indesign was a better replacement. If I know PageMaker, would it be easy to shift over to indesign? Does indesign recognize transplants? I'm tired of using clipping planes and importing them from Photoshop. I'd be interested and any comments about this software.

Indesign is awesome and very easy to pick up if you already know other adobe products. It is much better than Pagemaker all around.

The order to learn, imo:

Photoshop - you can do anything, but it is slow with text and just not the best solution for vector work (learn the difference between vectors and bitmaps - I can explain later...)
Illustrator - this a great program and you can layout large pages fairly easily
Indesign - if you do a lot of page layouts it's the best, but other than that you won't need it

photshop works in pixels, acad and illustrator w/vectors

i've been using CATIA lately for school and i have to say it is a f**kin awesome program. parametrically, you can pretty much do anything. although i think the UI has an "engineering" feel to it, but it's still the shit.

just wondering if anyone has any thoughts on its usefulness in today's architectural offices - besides gehry's and maybe foster's. if your firm has the money and the resources, would it consider taking on CATIA? and how far away are we from adopting the "gehry's" methodology?

Cleaning up photos and renderings that were not "perfect". I prefer to do quick renderings and paint/place the rest into the image. You may also consider Corel Painter 8 & an Intuos Wacom 6x8 tablet if you want to explore digital sketching/painting.

Illustrator: Single layouts, ie. one presentation board at a time. Though, I use AutoCAD 2005 in combination with Adobe Acrobat now to do a lot of my layouts and save out to PDF (gradients and pantone colors in AutoCAD 2005 rock). Please hold all CAD monkey comments.

InDesign: Multiple layouts/pages, ie. books, pamphlets, portfolios. It lets you separate content from layout (highly recommended). If you modify master pages, your whole project will update, ie. when you decide you want the page number to be in a different place on the page... just change one master page and the whole document will update.

In my opinion, you should learn these apps in this specific order. They are the order most students and architects use them.

What version of InDesign came before the adobe CS suite? Has anyone tried the pagemaker plug in?

I'm with 'virtual-architect'

However I just skip Illustrator and use Photoshop and Indesign along with whatever CAD program I am using.

If I can do "layout" in photoshop (I know) aside from text what are the advantages of indesign?

Indesign is for multiple pages.

Einstein wrote: If I can do "layout" in photoshop (I know) aside from text what are the advantages of indesign?

The advantages of Illustrator/InDesign are smaller file size.

Doing a layout in Photoshop of any high quality is very prohibitive file size wise. Also, once you rasterize text in Photoshop it is fixed in stone. Ill/InD allow you to stay moderately size independent until you are ready to save out to a specific format. I'm saying try not to use PShop for layout, unless that's all you have. 'Place' (link) your bitmaps to Ill/InD and they will update when/if you make changes to them.

Why use up so much file space when you dont have to?

defenestrator: InDesign 2 came before CS (ver. 3.0). I wouldn't recommend 2, though.

Einstein: To be honest, I wouldn't recommend doing anything vector-related in Photoshop; keep it to the raster images and save yourself the hassle. Use Illustrator for one-off vector images where you need a lot of control over what's going on (i.e. Bezier curves, etc). InDesign lets you combine everything in one file and mananges pagination for you (as visual-architect noted). In some ways, InDesign is like a multi-page Illustrator with less control over individual vector elements and enhance control over page-related/project-wide options. It should also be noted that you can drop images, PDFs, and Illustrator files straight into InDesign.

And yes, between master pages and character/paragraph styles, designing large, multi-page presentations (like, say, a newspaper or book) is a breeze.

Pete: I didn't mean that PhotoShop is the best for doing everything. I wouldn't choose PhotoShop to do most page layout/graphic design tasks. We use PhotoShop considerably more in our office than we use the other software - but this is just because we aren't a firm that does a huge amount of "presentation boards" and booklets and such. We use PhotoShop for a lot of tasks that are integrated directly into our construction document/CAD/3D modeling/other production tasks.
PhotoShop is something I use everyday. InDesign is something I use a few times a month. Illustrator is something I learned many years ago but don't use enough these days to maintain a truly efficient working knowledge of it at this point.

is it just me that does this, or does everyone import from ACAD to illustrator and then do their line weights in illustrator? or is there a step that i'm missing that allows you to transfer line weights from ACAD drawings when placing into illustrator?

Ya, if you have Adobe Acrobat installed plot to PDF and open/import into Illustrator/InDesign/Photoshop, too.

I don't use Acrobat Distiller much anymore, just the Adobe PDF plotter driver. I've even tweaked it to do 'D-size' in landscape correctly. Then, saved that setting to a new PDF driver. Now, I can take my PDFs to Kinko's and plot for about $4.25 per sheet for the first set, and I can make copies for about $3.50 per sheet (blackline on bond). Blueprinting is cheaper, but for the ease of going to Kinko's, not waiting (usually), and getting consistant results without having to bring my lineweight settings... I love the AutoCAD/PDF/Kinko's combination.

You don't even need full version of Acrobat. Go to www.sourceforge.com, search for "pdf creator", download a file called "PDFCreator-0_8_0_GNUGhostscript.exe". It's an open source solution to Abode Acrobat printer.