Radio Ibaia is a community station in Bilbao putting on a fundraiser, and the whole job is four things: a logo, a poster, one photograph of the studio with a cable removed from the middle of it, and a schedule page people will open on a phone. Four outputs, four different programs, and the questions that sort them have nothing to do with what anybody calls themselves. Is it printed or is it on a screen, and is it one surface or many.
That is the entire decision. A poster is printed and it is one surface, so it is drawn in Illustrator, or in Photoshop if a photograph is doing most of the work. The schedule is a screen and it is many surfaces, because it has to survive a phone and a laptop and a change to next month's programme, so it is built in Figma. Nothing about the studio photograph is a design decision at all until the cable is gone, which is Photoshop, and that is the one quadrant where the program is not really a choice.
The used part of each program is short
Every one of these has a few hundred commands and a working core of about a dozen. The core is not the same shape in each, and knowing which dozen is most of what this topic has to hand over.
In pixels: retouching, compositing and screen design, the core is selections, layers, masks and adjustment layers, and one sentence covers the half of it people get wrong: black hides and white shows on a mask. Paint black on the mask beside the studio photograph and the cable disappears without a single pixel of the photograph being deleted, so tomorrow's second opinion is still possible. The eraser is the tool that makes that impossible, which is why professionals stop using it early.
In vectors: logos, icons and illustration, the core is the pen, the shape builder, and the appearance of an object. The value worth carrying out of it: align the stroke inside so the shape keeps its stated size. A 40 mm circle with a 4 mm stroke centred on the path measures 44 mm on the page, which is how a logo drawn to fit a space arrives not fitting it, and nobody sees the cause because a stroke looks like a line rather than like half a line on each side.
In multi page documents, set properly, the core is text frames, paragraph styles and master pages. Base every paragraph style on the body style. Then the client who wants the whole document a point larger is one edit rather than nineteen, and the relationships between the sizes survive the change instead of being retyped from memory.
In interface design, and the file everyone is in at once, the core is frames, auto layout, components and libraries, and the confusion that costs a beginner an afternoon is smaller than any of them: a frame clips and a group does not. A group is a bag that resizes itself to hold whatever is inside it. A frame is a boundary with an opinion, and everything that behaves like a screen behaves like a frame.
The three formats, and which file you keep
Send a PDF for print and an SVG for the web. A printer wants one file that carries the type, the images and the colour space together, and that is a PDF; a browser wants something it can scale and recolour, and that is an SVG. Both are delivery formats, which is the part that gets missed: neither is the file you work in, and neither is the file you keep.
Never flatten the file you keep. The working file with its layers, masks and styles intact is the only version that can answer next year's request, and the fastest way to lose a client is to have shipped a beautiful flattened image and to have nothing to change when they want the date moved. Radio Ibaia will hold this fundraiser again, and the poster that gets reused is the one whose layers still exist.
The stall is knowing one program and treating every job as its job
This is where people stop and do not notice. Somebody learns Illustrator properly, gets good at it, and then a forty page programme arrives. It gets built in Illustrator, one artboard per page, because that is the program whose menus are known. It works until about page twelve. Then a section is inserted and every page number after it is wrong, and there is no way to renumber them because artboards do not know they are pages; the text does not flow from one to the next, so a paragraph that grows pushes nothing, it simply overlaps; and the eleven headings that are meant to match do not, because there are no styles, only eleven boxes that were each set by hand.
None of that is a shortcoming of Illustrator. It is a program for drawing one surface, being asked to be a program for setting many, and the tell is the moment you start doing something clever to make it work. That feeling is not resourcefulness. It is the wrong quadrant.
Inside any of the four
The order that gets you working, which is not the order a tutorial uses
The same five stops in every program, and the fourth is the one that decides whether the work can leave the building.
- week oneThe dozen tools that do the workOut of a few hundred commands, and it is a different dozen in each program
- week oneHow the file is organisedLayers, artboards, frames. What contains what, and what moves when a parent moves.
- the week it paysThe feature that makes one change apply everywhereStyles, masters, components. The reason the program was worth learning.
- before the first paid jobThe export dialogResolution, colour space, bleed, scale. The job is the export.
- wheneverEffects, and everything elseGenuinely last, and most of it will never be opened
Shortcuts are deliberately not a stop. The ten you repeat arrive without being studied, and the ones on a printed sheet are mostly for commands nobody uses.
Learn the export dialog before the effects
The order inside any of these programs is the same and it is not the order a tutorial uses. Learn the dozen tools, then learn how the file is organised, then learn the one feature that makes a change apply everywhere, and only then the effects. Learn the export dialog before the effects, because the export is what the job actually is: a poster that cannot be exported at 300 dots to the inch with its bleed is not a finished poster, and a screen graphic exported at the wrong scale is a blurry graphic in somebody else's website by Tuesday.
Shortcuts arrive on their own and do not need studying. The ten you repeat will be repeated whether or not anybody set out to learn them, and the ones on a printed cheat sheet are mostly for commands you will never use.
What to open in 2026, and what to open instead
Photoshop, Illustrator and InDesign remain the three that a job advertisement lists and that a print shop assumes. Photoshop took over from the retouching bureau, Illustrator from Macromedia FreeHand, which Adobe withdrew in 2007, and InDesign from QuarkXPress in the middle of the 2000s. All three are a subscription with no free path, and the honest alternatives are real but uneven: Krita and GIMP cover most of what a beginner needs from Photoshop, Inkscape is a serious vector program, and Scribus is the free page layout option and is the weakest of the three substitutions rather than an equal.
Figma has been the default for screen work since 2019, when it took the seat from Sketch by running in a browser, and its free tier is unusually generous for a program of that reach. Penpot is the open source answer for teams whose files are not allowed on somebody else's server. Everything else you will be handed at some point is in the rest of the software you will be handed, and CorelDRAW in particular is still what a sign shop opens, which surprises people who have only ever seen the Adobe list.
What none of this settles is what to put in the file once it is open, and that is the more expensive question by a wide margin. The rules for a printed piece are in marks, layouts and printed things, the rules for a screen in the surface people touch, and drawing by hand rather than assembling is drawing, painting and building images by hand. A program will let you do all three badly at full speed, which is the one thing it will never warn you about.