These days the free software is better than the stuff you pay for. See http://www.scribus.net/ .
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If any of your projects will include printing by commercial printers you might consider Adobe InDesign. While PhotoShop will work for small projects, it's primary focus is image maniplulation while InDesign's focus is layout design.
EfV
Scribus was designed for use for commercial printing. It wont let you use substandard fonts and supports a whole lot of color profile things that I don't understand. It's likely far more power than you need. It makes for a little tricky UI but you can't beat the price.
“The power of the Web is in its universality. Access by everyone regardless of disability is an essential aspect.”
—Tim Berners-Lee, W3C Director and inventor of the World Wide Web
If you're looking for free software, I'll second scribus for page-layout, and would suggest inkscape for illustration and the GIMP for photo manipulation.
If you're looking to break the bank you've quite a few options, 2 of which would be:
A mixture of Adobe inDesign and Illustrator, the former for page-layout and the latter for illustration (as I'm sure the name gave away)
or
You could try CorelDraw which mixes the vast majority of feature-sets from both page-layout and illustration programmes. (I'd take this over Adobe's stuff any day, but Inkscape is still my choice for illustration)
For photo manipulation, the best product out there really is Adobe PhotoShop - others (The GIMP, for example) do get extremely close - but PS still wins hands-down.
One more thing to consider if your projects are to be sent out to a commercial printery, typically the printery will only have certain file formats that they will accept the work in. Check with a couple that you might use to verify that whichever program you finally decide to use will output the file format accepted by the printery.
InDesign for example, is an industry standard and will be accepted or recommended by nearly all commercial printers.
EfV
InDesign for example, is an industry standard and will be accepted or recommended by nearly all commercial printers.
Safest way for sending files to any production house is to use a dedicated interchange format with all system-specific properties removed from the process, eg:
a PDF or EPS file with all fonts coverted to curve paths, all images embedded, hairline strokes changed to a defined value etc etc.
Any decent grapcics programme (Scribus, inDesign, Illustrator, Corel, Inkscape Quark Express(spits) all included) will be able to export to either or both of these formats.
May sound funny but I use Fireworks for all my print layout and design. I just really like the ease of use and image manipulation...damn site better that MS Publisher.
Safest way for sending files to any production house is to use a dedicated interchange format with all system-specific properties removed from the process, eg:
a PDF or EPS file with all fonts coverted to curve paths, all images embedded, hairline strokes changed to a defined value etc etc.
Any decent grapcics programme (Scribus, inDesign, Illustrator, Corel, Inkscape Quark Express(spits) all included) will be able to export to either or both of these formats.
I believe FreeHand can be included as well. Though I think they're phasing out the software but I could be wrong.
Most printers ask for PDF (Portable Document Format (PDF) is a file format created by Adobe Systems in 1993 for document exchange. - Wikipedia). Most software will create PDF's, just some make it a bit of a performance where others it's built in.
Depending on the project, but for my company I am in charge of creation for wall banners / ad pages for magazines / posters / product displays / booth displays / booth graphics.
It really depends on how large of a scale you are going.
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