Publisher

The Adobe CS suite. Photoshop is vital. Illustrator is too. Also InDesign for page layout. Acrobat is important. All of these are in the CS suite. There is also a program for working on the web (Dreamweaver).

Jewel is absolutely right. You need Photoshop for touching up and altering photos, and Illustrator for line illustrations and product packaging/labeling. InDesign is good for layout of publications. And if you're interested in going into web design, I'd recommend DreamWeaver and Flash.

Photoshop, Illustrator, & InDesign. I'm a graphic designer and those three programs are pretty much all I use.

I am a print designer and I use Adobe InDesign CS 3 for page layout, Illustrator 7 for drawing and for editing clipart, PhotoShop 7 for photo retouching, altering, making collages and just goofing around with. The version numbers are not so important. I have to use InDesign CS 3 to be compatible with my largest client. No CS 3 - no income from that STEADY client. All the above can be used for creating graphics, documents for use on the web - but there are techincal differences in how files are created for the web. I also do a little web design and have found knowing basic html programming to be VERY helpful in understanding the finer points of web design regardless of the web editing program I am using. I have used Dreamweaver, but it is very expensive. I really like Site Spinner, it's much more reasonable and is very similar to the page layout programs I was taught to use for print design. PhotoShop ImageReady is used to create animated gifs for the web. If you are an illustrator or a sculptor, you might find 3D drawing and animation interesting too. I was taught using Infini-D and I really related to that program because I have used vector illustration so much. I don't even know what the latest/greatest is in that area these days. There is so much more, animation, video games, software interface design... Do you know what area you might want to go into?