When I first dipped my toes into the pool of web design in early 1996, design tools sure were different. Designing in Photoshop 3 and 4 was tedious! Type rasterized immediately. Drop shadows and bevels were miraculous feats of lighting effects. I maintained a thick notebook full of design notes about fonts, effects, filters — all so I could edit existing files and exactly replicate my work. The release of Photoshop 5 changed my life. Editable type! Drop shadows! A history palette!

In those golden days, we wrote all our own HTML. TextEdit and BBEdit for me! I became a tabbing mistress. Curse those non-tabbing coders. Then came the advent of Adobe Pagemill 2.0 in 1997, the first major WYSIWYG HTML editor. Boy, did that code ever make my eyes cross. Soon after, I had to deal with Microsoft Frontpage-generated code. Tables within tables within tables within…well, you get my drift. The first editor I truly embraced was Claris Homepage, which offered both code and WYSIWYG views for editing. Homepage eventually morphed into Macromedia Dreamweaver and is now, of course, an Adobe product.

What’s that? An Adobe product? No way! Adobe seemingly revolutionized web and print design tools. My professional life has basically revolved around Adobe; and my efficiency has basically depended upon Adobe’s advances. On April 12, Adobe released Creative Suite 5. So what have they accomplished this time around? Here’s a very high-level overview of the best new features. These are the tools I use the most. Check out Webdesigner Depot’s comprehensive review to get all the juicy deets.

CS Live (New!)

• BrowserLab: Check your web pages in various browsers and OS’s.
• Acrobat.com: Set up a central, online workspace and collaborate on copy for InDesign layouts.
• SiteCatalyst NetAverages: learn about the latest Internet usage trends, including browser and OS statistics.

Photoshop

• Content-Aware Fill: Sort of like the rubber stamp tool…on steroids! This is amazing.
• Puppet Warp: I don’t know how often I’ll use this, but it’s super cool. Add pivot points, or “pins” as Adobe calls them, to an object and then move it in any direction. So if you wanted to, you could take a tree and bend it to look as if it’s in a gale-force wind.

Dreamweaver

• Support for PHP-based content management systems
• Enhanced CSS starter layouts
• Integration with Adobe’s new BrowserLab

Illustrator

• Now you can work in up to 100 artboards all at once.
• Get better control with your paintbrushes with variable-width strokes.
• The new shapebuilder tool allows you to combine, edit, and fill shapes directly on your artboard.

Well, that’s enough to convince me. Do I have the new CS5 yet? Not yet, but I can’t wait.