O.T Album Artwork...

Guys i need help and this is probably the best place i know of. Once my album is complete(March....fingers crossed) i want to have them pressed by Discmakers.Here's my problem.....i have NO idea which "Art" program i should be interested in.I am a fish out of water here! They require one of the following to open there templates so i can "fill in the blanks" with my pic's,drawings or whatever i decide to go with...:Illustrator,QuarkXpress,In Design,Coreldraw or Freehand.... I'm not looking to do extreme graphics but i do want to put out a quality package to back up my Quality Recording If you guys could give me a little input on a direction to head into that'd be great.PLEASE keep in mind i'm a newbie to this area of album production.

Any of the packages you mentioned would do. Depends on what you can afford. I use Illustrator exclusively for my artwork and would recommend it especially if you know photoshop as the integration and interface are very good. Quark and Illustrator are the industry standards with Freehand and in-design close seconds. Get a demo of illustrator at adobe.com open your supplied templates and have a play.

Quark is very expensive, but a great program. You might also try Macromedia's Fireworks. Although it's designed for web use, you can easily design graphics with it. Good luck!!

we have been providing graphic services for at least 15 years to our clients as well as audio production. I can tell you the best design / composition software ever created is Photoshop! It is the industry standard image editing software. I have tried several others and nothing comes close. For layout we also use Pagemaker / although we have files come in fairly often from quark. download the demos of each of these programs and try it yourself

Check out CorelDraw (free fully functional demo at corel.com). Very powerful program with amazing capabilities (very similar to Illustrator but easier to use IMO). Quark and InDesign are both great for layout but aren't really for creating anything from scratch - just putting pieces together. Photoshop is the best especially if you're dealing mostly with full color art/photos. If you're pretty new to this side of things I would definitely try CoreDraw first (its also the most affordable of all).

Great Feedback guys, Keep'em coming.............so Photoshop eh??.i'll DL the Demo and give it a try.Thanks

Hello, You mentioned Discmakers, (great company) but be sure and check their template section (and, more important their delivery requirement section) because they require specific templates done on specific programs that can load on their systems. For example, many programs are excellent but they recommend not doing your entire layout in some programs without certain restrictions. Last time I checked this was the case, but it could have changed recently. L.A.Branville PS. I've used Coreldraw for Discmakers and everything went well.