This isn't a 'what's the difference between Photoshop and Illustrator'. I'm interested in views on a theoretical brief.

Say you had to create a super large format print (e.g. Something on a building about 20m wide) with text, photography, some shadow effects achievable by each programme and some additional gradient / transparency. Do you: • Use Illustrator as base package and send to print as PDF (as vectors with raster at appropriate resolution), but risk losing some control in the rendering of it?

• Use Photoshop as base package, ensure pixel perfect output by sending totally rasterised TIFF (or similar) at appropriate resolution? • Do something else. I grew up with more comfort in Illustrator and so my preference has always been #1, but recently as I've switched my style to being less typography-based I'm beginning to question this. Small documents always use illustrator as base.

Larger jobs use indesign as base. I prefer illustrator for everything as its much more creative freeform than indesign which is little stilted in workflow. Cutter management and creation in illustrator for example. You can work straight into Photoshop and supply the document to whoever but you will need to brief the printer accoringly and they will need to put those into there prepress system. So create document at size in Illustrator and use Photoshop for actual Bitmap content. Saving out print ready pdfs from illustrator is really easy (pass4press or print ready PDFs).

Just got to overprint cutters and spec them as specials so they don't knock out and stay on there own registered plates. Make sure you talk to someone who is confident in workflow or it could be costly. Another vote here for Illustrator. I certainly wouldn't use InDesign – I'd only recommend it for pages based publications e.g.

Inkscape is an Open Source vector graphics editor, with capabilities similar to Illustrator, Freehand, CorelDraw, or Xara X using the W3C standard Scalable Vector Graphics (SVG) file format.

Magazines, brochures, booklets, possibly ePubs etc. I think the key is to speak to whoever is going to be printing the design and ask how they want you to supply your artwork. They will have experience of what works well and what fails miserably. Odds are they will accept PDF and may well be able to send you a PDF preset (.joboptions) you can use to make sure it meets their requirements.

If they have oddball requirements then it's better to find out early on! Thanks guys - very interesting to hear. Unsurprisingly the conclusion is each to their own!

I suppose my main thinking was that if you have a quite complex PDF, you're slightly at the mercy of the prepress guys to make sure it is rendered properly. That's usually okay if you're using a diligent printer, but sometimes that's not the case. I recently had an issue with a client printing inhouse on a semi-commercial large format HP printer which wasn't rendering drop shadow properly, not to mention a few PDF 'artefacts' appearing. I think that's what led me to wonder if Photoshop is preferable to produce a 'pixel perfect' output for complex renderings rather than a PDF whose algorithm is open to (minor) interpretation.

A few comments: • Indesign - I actually use a lot for multi-page layout work, but hadn't considered for single pieces of artwork. I must admit its PDF outputs do seem to be excellent, so I might try that next time • Photoshop - re bleed I guess you set the artwork at the non-cropped size, add guides if you want to show it and then liaise with prepress to make sure it's interpreted properly Thanks for your thoughts so far guys! Thanks guys - very interesting to hear. Unsurprisingly the conclusion is each to their own!