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Here's a holiday gift for you: Adobe has packaged its indispensable design apps into an suite of tools dubbed Adobe Creative Suite. It's not only a tremendous price bargain, but the tools work together — and work in team environments — in ways that are sure to appeal to intranet pros.

Creative Suite retails for $1,229, which is low considering all that you get with this five CD set. It includes Photoshop CS, Illustrator CS, InDesign CS, Acrobat 6.0 Professional, GoLive, GoLive Co-Author, and a new file management utility called Version Cue. Besides that, there's a smorgasbord of clip art, stock photos, symbols, brushes, fonts and an excellent video workshop training CD to help you get up and running. An upgrade version is available for an even more irresistible $749.

With the Creative Suite, Adobe continues its push to integrate the user interfaces of its apps. You'll be able to work more productively since the tools not only work the same way, but integrate with each other so that you can quickly switch from one to another. Once you've switched apps, the commands, shortcuts, and palettes will mostly be the same. Also, the tools all use the Adobe Color Engine, so that what you see on the screen will never vary from tool to tool.

It's obvious, once you start playing with the tools, that the Adobe programmers have given a lot of attention to simplifying workflows. Version Cue is a great little utility for finding files quickly and making sure you always have the correct version. For many teams, Version Cue will offer the biggest reason to upgrade — and to convert to all-Adobe tools. It allows you to track assets across a network and save multiple versions. It will instantly tell you when elements have been updated by another user, so you can quickly import the new version into your project. It doesn't yet work with Adobe Acrobat, but should still prove a real timesaver, especially if you've had a problem with two people editing the same graphics file and the same time and overwriting each others versions.

You'll probably be spending most of your time in Photoshop, the graphic design tool that's become such a standard that you occasionally hear references to it on TV sitcoms. Right away you'll notice the enhanced file browser, which isn't new, but has had its role expanded for Creative Suite. Use it to organize and find files in a snap, and also perform batch procedures on groups of images without the bother of opening them all first.

The browser's preview pane lets you see high-quality preview images at any size, and the metadata pane lets you insert or edit metadata for files or groups of files. Call it up with the new File Browser button located in the Options palette. In Photoshop CS, you can also view and edit custom file information, create your own keyboard shortcuts, turn files into quick PDF presentations for sharing, and generate instant Web photo galleries that even allow you to solicit client feedback. Add to that a slew of smaller improvements targeted at photographers, video editors, and of course, graphic designers, and you have the must-have tool of the season.

Of course, all the tools in this suite feature just as many improvements. Illustrator, always a great 2-D drawing tool, now lets you work on 3-D objects, as well. InDesign, which has long been fighting an uphill battle against Quark for marketshare, benefits with typography tools that may tempt many longtime Quark users to switch. GoLive, Adobe's Web page design tool, has so far proven popular with visual designers, but with few others. The new GoLive integrates especially well with InDesign, letting users drag objects from InDesign and place them directly into Web pages. It's handy, but Dreamweaver's top spot among professional Web builders seems safe.

Aside from the upgraded apps, Creative Suite ships with a slender design guide that walks you through the steps of creating projects, and also with a tutorial CD that offers useful tips and suggestions for every part of the suite. In Creative Suite, Adobe's powerful tools go beyond simply helping you create great-looking images; they now integrate in useful ways so that you and your team can work efficiently together.