Taking the concept of 'integration' to new levels, Adobe Creative Suite 3 is more than a collection of top programs -- it's a design workflow system in its own right.

Good design software slots into your creative workflow neatly. Adobe Creative Suite 3 goes a step further by offering everything you need for the entire job, from start to finish.

To this end, the Design Premium edition includes Photoshop CS3 for raster image editing, Illustrator CS3 for vector illustration, InDesign CS3 for page layouts, Acrobat 8 Professional for print and electronic publishing, Dreamweaver CS3 for website design, Flash CS3 Professional for interactive content, and Bridge CS3 for media management.

To make such a wide range of programs work together effectively, they need to share common technologies and support each other's file formats seamlessly. For a perfect example of this level of integration, look no further than SmartObjects. An Adobe technology that allows native files of one program to be incorporated into documents created with another, SmartObjects have been greatly enhanced in Creative Suite 3.

With SmartObjects, you can put an Illustrator vector graphic inside a Photoshop image, yet still be able to re-edit and update that graphic from within Illustrator at any time. There's no need to commit yourself to specific sizes and resolutions for web images either: just add them as SmartObjects to your Dreamweaver pages, then resize them losslessly whenever you like.

File format support in CS3 has been expanded too. As well as being able to work with native Photoshop (PSD), Illustrator (AI) and Acrobat (PDF) files throughout the Suite, you can preserve all your layers -- very handy when importing designs into Flash. You can even place InDesign (INDD) files into other InDesign layouts, treating them like graphics.

Adobe has boosted InDesign's ability to export web-ready data by letting you generate XHTML from your page layouts. Dreamweaver can then automatically reformat for the web using CSS, enabling a powerful print-to-web workflow straight out of the box. It's now also possible to drive a mobile web workflow from anywhere in the Suite thanks to the introduction of Adobe Device Central CS3, a program that lets you preview how graphics, pages and interactive content will appear across a wide range of mobile handsets.

Better still, Creative Suite 3 features the closest integration of Adobe program interfaces to date. Selection tools, pen tools and so on are common across the Suite, as are most of the palettes, and you can preserve your custom interface arrangements as workspaces in all the programs. You can share colour swatches between Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign, and certain special features are found in more than one program, such as transparency effects in both Photoshop and InDesign, or animation functions in both Photoshop and Flash.

Creative Suite 3 not so much fits your creative workflow as redefines and streamlines the workflow itself.