The best designers and developers are those that most cleverly draw upon their talents, imagination, and understanding of a brief. Their creativity has the power to educate people, to share ideas, to sell products, to tell stories and to incite — via just about any medium imaginable.

However, today's tough economic times may mean that the biggest challenges for the graphic arts creative teams are not mastering their craft, but instead strangled budgets and cost cutting. Factors that are entirely out of their control. Or are they?...

As three research agencies and a leading technology magazine recently, publically deduced, Adobe Creative Suite 4 can be used by designers to achieve productivity gains - applying their creative thinking to ways to do more with less; to maintain profitability; and to deliver high quality work in the face of tough competition.

Designed for faster execution of everyday tasks, CS4's efficient workflows make it possible to meet tighter deadlines with smaller budgets, so upgrades pay for themselves.

OMNI Research Group; Forrester Research; APC magazine; and Pfeiffer Group undertook close inspection of CS4 and reported back, offering advice for would-be users on business gains that can be achieved by using the suite.

OMNI Research Group:
"We observed that benchmark processing time and reduced steps in creating a finished content piece translated to approximately 18% in Total Factor Productivity (TFP) improvement."

"Enterprise and small business user organizations should consider an investment in Adobe Creative Suite 4, bundled appropriately with Adobe Acrobat 9 technology, to maximise workforce productivity in managing communications and content creation."

OMNI especially liked the that the combined CS4 applications seamlessly blends the creative process with ease of use, so that what is created in one application can easily be attended to from another with different rendering tools.

"Adobe's elimination of unnecessary processes and redundant steps has improved the CS4 bundle to a point of significantly lowering complexity. And this becomes most obvious to the user working to develop content pieces that integrate Flash architecture, layered graphics, and multipurpose rendering options."

Sheri McLeish, Analyst at Forrester Research:

"With hundreds and hundreds of new features, this release will save your people time and effort to create high quality content, which in the big-budget creative field translates directly into money."

"If your designers and developers haven't come asking for CS4 yet, just wait, they will. Budget for it."

"This release is about productivity - going from 15 clicks to two, or two hours to two minutes, to accomplish the complex and often tedious steps involved in creating, editing, and finalizing creative content."

Pfeiffer Consulting:
Adobe commissioned Pfeiffer Consulting to undertake in-depth benchmarking tests of CS4. The following first round results quantify the productivity gains CS4 offers for everyday tasks over previous releases as well as relevant competitive products.

"Making three adjustments in Adobe Photoshop® CS4 software using the new Adjustments panel is more than 200% faster than using Adjustment Layers in previous versions to achieve the same results. Work directly on an image with on-image controls and interact fluidly with Photoshop for image adjustments without having to deal with menu commands or dialog boxes."

"Using Live View in Adobe Dreamweaver® CS4 software is nearly twice as fast as previewing rendered pages in a browser. Using Live Code, you see the results of coding changes in Live View more than twice as fast as you would switching to a browser. Additionally, you can click a related file to see both its source in Code view and the parent page in Design view."

"Finding and fixing an error in a 2-page Adobe InDesign® CS4 software layout with Live Preflight is 200% faster than finding and fixing errors using the Preflight options in InDesign CS3. Live Preflight in InDesign CS4 alerts you to potential production problems in real time so you can quickly navigate to a problem, fix it in layout, and keep working—helping you avoid costly errors in handoffs to print or Flash output."

"New AVCHD support in Adobe Premiere® Pro CS4 software is up to 300% faster than importing the same footage with Apple Final Cut Pro. Adobe Premiere Pro CS4 offers native tapeless support for AVCHD, P2, XDCAM, and RED, so you can dramatically decrease the time it takes to go from shooting to editing."

Australian Personal Computer magazine's review of CS4 in November 2008 focused on the new design features that journalists, John Brandon and Christopher Zammit, deemed made this version the best graphic software suite yet. They picked seven highlights that topped their list of the aspects they loved most. Six of the seven centred around greater efficiencies and time saving enhancements for users:

LIVE PREFLIGHT - INDESIGN
InDesign now alerts users to incorrect images sizes, resolutions and even tells you when you have overspilled text on a page and where to find it.

CONTENT-AWARE SCALING - PHOTOSHOP
Recompose a photo as you resize it without distorting the image. This preserves vital areas (such as people) as the image adapts to new dimensions.

WEB DESIGN IN INDESIGN
Design your interactive material using InDesign and then export it directly to Flash in SWF format,

AMAZINGLY SIMPLE ANIMATIONS - FLASH
With the new Bones tool, it's now possible to animate a simple illustration in real time as well as create more naturally animated interactions between linked objects.

FIND CODE IN DREAMWEAVER LIVE VIEW
The new code navigator makes finding relevant lines of code a simple one-step process. No more tedious searches.

VIDEO POST PRODUCTION
Move content among After Effects, Adobe Premiere Pro, Soundbooth and Encore with unparalleled efficiency. Expanded Dynamic Link enables you to link content between components so you can see updates instantly without rendering.

Change has come to the design world. Every design brief can be fulfilled via a myriad of mediums, technologies and channels. In a perfect world, budgets would support all the exciting potential opening up. But creative teams can no longer afford to leave the figures to the finance team and account managers. Every step in the creative process comes at a cost, but by taking advantage of the timesaving features of Adobe Creative Suite 4, there is a way to deliver innovative, striking design that is budget-friendly.