Announcing Adobe Creative Suite 5 - A Great Update for Web Designers

I am very excited about this latest version of Adobe Creative Suite 5 - the changes to Dreamweaver are excellent and should make both beginners and advanced users happy. Plus, Flash now can save the fla files as an XML file structure that will make it easier for third party developers to create tools as well as designers and developers to work together on projects at the same time. I was lucky enough to get a product overview from the Adobe product managers for both Dreamweaver and Flash. And in both briefings, I was constantly exclaiming "oh! I've needed that for years!" I haven't had a chance to review the final products yet, but from the briefings I think that they have done an excellent job with this release.

Some of the Changes You Can Expect with Creative Suite 5

There are now five versions of Adobe Creative Suite 5: Design Premium, Design Standard, Web Premium, Production Premium, and Master Collection. It can be hard to decide which suite you might need, so I've updated my article How to Choose Between Adobe Creative Suite Editions. You should also check out what is in the creative suite box depending upon which version you purchase.

Dreamweaver has gotten some great changes for beginners and advanced users. The new site wizard has been completely revamped, as have the CSS layout templates. And I'm really excited to try out editing a WordPress, Drupal, or Joomla! template in design view because they've added a bunch of tools to make this vastly easier. There are lots of other new features to Dreamweaver that you can read about: Differences Between Dreamweaver CS5 and CS4. If you decide to get Dreamweaver, you should make sure you have the system requirements (Windows or Macintosh) to support it.

There are also some really exciting developments in Flash, Illustrator, and Photoshop that Web designers will be interested in. These are more extensively covered on other About.com sites: Animation for Adobe Flash Information and Graphics Software for Photoshop and Illustrator. Contribute has been revved along with the other Creative Suite products, but it doesn't appear to have changed much. And BrowserLab has been expanded to include more browsers and has been embedded into Dreamweaver.

I Can't Wait To Try it Out

I haven't felt this excited about a software release in many years. The changes to Dreamweaver and Flash are going to make them so much easier to use in design mode, but still as powerful as ever. And I have high hopes for editing CMS templates. CS5 looks like a great version for Web designers, and when I get a review copy, I'll let you know if I think it really does play out.