Adobe Systems Inc. officially announced the new suite, which includes new CS2 versions of Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign and GoLive, at the conference. Sponsored by the company, the Adobe Ideas Conference featured a selection of workshops for design professionals and managers.

Adobe Bridge is a new file-browsing application introduced in CS2 that works across the suite, enabling users to easily view, sort and manage files while working in any of the suite's applications. It is tightly integrated with Version Cue 2.

Adobe is touting multipublishing at its CS2 launch. Click here to read more.

Randy Squires, a prepress team leader for Hemlock Printers Ltd., in Burnaby, British Columbia, said of CS2, "It's fantastic. With these changes, it will make it much easier for designers to get to their work." He said his department definitely will upgrade to CS2, partly for the functionality and partly to stay current. "We always have to have all the latest compatibilities," he said.

Tessa Garcia, director of advertising operations at The Journal News, a Gannett newspaper in White Plains, N.Y., said she is interested in Adobe Bridge, but her staff is not in a position to upgrade to CS2 because it just migrated from Quark to InDesign last August.

The bridge would save a lot of time viewing files, especially in the company's custom publishing division. Garcia said she would be interested in Adobe Bridge as a stand-alone application.

Shukri Farhad, creative principal at Media 27 Inc., an ad agency in Santa Barbara, Calif., got his first look at CS2 on Sunday and said he was impressed. "The thing that stands out is the level of integration between the applications in the Adobe environment. It's easy to get around because the palettes are the same, the metaphor is the same, and it handles layers well in all applications." Farhad works closely with Adobe and was a presenter at the conference.

Adobe focuses on tighter integration in CS2. Click here to read more.

Don Springer, a photographer with offices in Philadelphia and Prospect, Conn., also said he appreciates the way Adobe integrates its applications. "We have different outputs, with a lot of images going for both print and Web." He said that with Adobe Bridge and Version Cue CS2, it will be much simpler to repurpose his images.

Bryan Canniff, principal of Bryan Canniff Design, of New York, said Creative Suite 1 has made his job easier by simplifying the transfer of content between InDesign and GoLive. "Where it really makes a difference is moving content to GoLive. They made a better mousetrap."

The tight integration of Adobe's suite makes it a hit in design schools, according to Jean Dahlgren, program coordinator for graphic design at The Sage Colleges, based in Albany, N.Y. She said her program graduates 120 students a year, all trained in Adobe applications.

"Students have to have laptops with the Creative Suite loaded. It's a requirement," she said. The Sage Colleges do not teach Quark XPress. "That's how Adobe will win, because all the new users are learning InDesign," Dahlgren said.

Another design teacher, Barbara Rietschel, of The Fashion Institute of Technology, of New York, said most art schools teach InDesign instead of Quark, in part because Adobe has made site licensing less expensive for educational institutions than Quark has.

Upgrades to Illustrator and InDesign have improved vectors and styles. Click here to read more.

Deborah Grisorio, a graphic designer at Time Inc., said she is especially impressed by the new Vanishing Point feature in Photoshop CS2. Vanishing Point allows users to relocate visual objects within an illustration and have them change perspective automatically.

In a demonstration, a painting was moved from one wall to another wall perpendicular to the first, and the perspective auto-corrected. Grisorio said she also was impressed by Live Trace, which lets users convert scanned images such as drawings to vectors in one step.

Grisorio said her department is "still stuck with Quark for a while" but will probably migrate at least to InDesign because of its superior compatibility with Illustrator and Photoshop.

Bill Moore, another Time graphic designer, said he is impressed with the enhanced collaboration features in Acrobat 7, which is included in Creative Suite 2. "The speed with which you can get files for comment and send them back is very important to us," he said.

Live Trace also caught the eye of Michael Josefowicz, special projects manager at the Parsons School of Design, in New York. "From an educational standpoint, it makes the pencil important again," he said. "We believe the pencil is the most important tool."

Another creative professional pleased with Live Trace is Roberto de Vicq de Cumptich, a senior art director at Harper Collins Publishers. He said Live Trace revives the functionality that Adobe pioneered in its Streamline application. "It's as good as or better than Streamline."

He said the Adobe Stock Photos service that is built into Creative Suite 2 also will help him. "Normally with stock photos, once you find the material, if you're not able to save it and collect it, you have to search for it again later. This will save time."

Harikrishna Katragadda, a freelance photographer and an assistant at Ira Block Photography, said, "I'm very pleased with the fact that everything I wanted in Photoshop is there [in Photoshop CS2.]

Katragadda said Adobe Bridge will enable him to group photos and apply a change, such as an adjustment in color temperature, to all of them at once. After viewing a series of demonstrations, he said, he concluded that the suitewide integration is much better than it was in Creative Suite 1. "Before, it took too much time, too much work. It became game-playing in Photoshop."

Pamela Williams, an owner/partner in Williams and House, a communications firm in Avon, Conn., said the Adobe Bridge and Adobe Stock Photos will be useful to her.

Williams emphasized that she appreciates the way Adobe understands its customers' needs. "They show a great commitment to and understanding of the field of design," she said. "They really get it."

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