Graphics Software
For print designers, you’ll spend most of your time in a page layout program. Adobe InDesign is the industry standard. Quark XPress is still alive, but just barely—used mostly in newspapers and smaller publications. Don’t try to break new ground here, go with InDesign.
Adobe has cornered the vector art creation market since the 90s when they bought Macromedia and killed Freehand. Illustrator is still the standard, but for the first time in my memory we have a serious alternative. Affinity Designer is a new application, but you wouldn’t know it after using it. For a 1.0 version, it offers a lot for print and web designers. If you don’t have an investment in Adobe Creative Cloud, Affinity Designer is definitely the route to go.
For image editing, things are a little more flexible. For print designers and photographers, you have two superb options. Adobe Photoshop is the industry standard, and will give you everything you need (and an absolute shit ton more that you don’t). But Pixelmator is a real option.
Pixelmator offers the ability to open and save PSD, JPG and TIF files, and is a lot less bloated, so it runs much faster. You won’t notice it as much on a desktop, but on a less powerful laptop, the difference is more obvious. Pixelmatr doesn’t support CMYK, but that shouldn’t matter if you’re exporting final artwork as PDF/X-1a anyway.
For web and multimedia designers, it almost seems like overkill to go with Photoshop. Pixelmator is all you need, and at only $30 it’s a bargain, but there are also a bunch of great image editors that offer screen-resolution editing—which is fine for web and multimedia designers.
Adobe Dreamweaver & Flash have plenty of alternatives, but none are a full-featured or widely accepted. If you’re a web designer, you almost have to go with Adobe Creative Cloud unless you’re willing to look at the less-capable alternatives.
As for me, I stick with Adobe’s Creative Cloud subscription service. It’s only $50 per month and you get every desktop app Adobe offers, plus access to thousands of fonts and other cloud-based goodies. If you work 100% by yourself, never share files with other designers or print shops, all work going out of your office is provided in PDF format, you can get away with using alternative apps. But the reality is that very few designers work in a bubble. For good or for bad, Adobe Creative Cloud is here to stay, and you’re better off accepting it and get on with making money.
Office
In the past, owning a copy of Microsoft Office was nearly a must. Now, I think you’re foolish to spend the money on it. First of all, you can register a free outlook.com email address and use Office apps for free on the web. And second, I can’t even figure out which version to buy. That’s probably good enough for most designers. If you have a Gmail address already, you can use Google Apps as well.
If you prefer to have desktop apps, Apple ships a copy of their iWork apps (Pages, Keynote and Numbers) with every new Mac. They’re fantastic alternatives. In fact, many companies are standardizing on Keynote for presentations because it’s that damn good. You can open and save MS Office files using iWork apps, so unless you have highly-specialized needs that only MS Office can offer, save your money.
Next: Web, Social Media and Final Advice
Boycott Creative Cloud! Adobe’s subscription-only lock-in scam is outrageous! I will stay on my perpetual license CS6 until it no longer functions, then switch to an alternative – probably Affinity Serif or whatever is ready by then. Terms and conditions of subscription are unacceptable. Look into it. In the long term you lose a lot with a subscription-only.
Good luck with that.
I believe I covered the pricing issues early in this article. But what is so horrible about the terms and conditions of Creative Cloud subscriptions, specifically?