The Dilemma
Gah, I own CS2 but lost the key and for months now Adobe has been dancing around getting me my key. Same with Studio 8 (now that Adobe owns that too).
So, I started looking for website and graphics tools that were modestly priced, and found some pretty cool stuff… maybe you know about it, maybe not.
Caveats
The web-products below generate their own CSS and inline styles (but they do support naming, just usually in DIV tags)… not the best for integration with a bigger site or .NET custom stuff, but I am going to try and figure that out too, because these products make graphics and web layout about as painless as I have seen in years
Meet the Xara Line ($50-100)
Page Layout, “WYSIWYG on crack” editing (text repel / graphic and text layout is super easy), but this is not the best for painting :
cheapest: http://www.xara.com/us/products/webdesigner/
more phun: http://www.xara.com/us/products/xtreme/
Meet MediaChance ($50):
RealDraw puts some interesting twists on blending vector illustration (drawing) and raster graphics (painting) – pretty cool, and potentially non-destructive (look at NPR styles, lighting studio and liquid vectors just to name a couple kewl psychotic tricks):
Real-Draw: http://www.mediachance.com/realdraw/index.html
Other Stuff: http://www.mediachance.com/
Enjoy! I know I am 🙂 Maybe I will have a website up soon using these.