By now you have seen the people involved and the products which can be made for the multimedia market. But how do you actually go about it? Well there are a few tools, which make the job easier.

Over the years there have been major breakthroughs in software development, which has resulted in, easy to work with programs, easy to create programs for the multimedia artist or designer or the storywriter. It is now upto you to decide which program to use for your creation. From desktop publishing programs to authoring tools, as a multimedia artist you have a wide range to choose from.

Some of the generic programs in use are: desktop publishing, image making & manipulation programs, making animations from illustrations, presentation programs, and then there are the authoring programs.

Let's have a brief look at each:

Desktop publishing programs are mainly for producing brochures, flyers, newsletters, invitation cards, business cards, etc. There are specialized DTP programs, which will allow you to produce all of the above mentioned with considerable ease. Though with the advancement of some word processors pure DTP programs are more of an overkill in some cases.

Though not a pure multimedia tool, these programs can still be useful as part of the process. Many a desktop publisher has gone on to become a successful multimedia producer/artist, mainly because of the discipline learnt in this part of the trade. DTP's would normally be used in the multimedia stage when you would want to announce the arrival of the finished product, or anything related to it.

Some examples of these programs would be; Aldus PageMaker, Microsoft Publisher, and Adobe PageMaker.

These programs are really the bread and butter of the multimedia person. They make image making really easy for experienced artists, and even for people who do not have much experience can still use them without too much trouble. As long as the user has imagination, there is really not much trouble in producing quality illustrations or drawings. Once the basic drawings are made it is then easy to manipulate them around to look exactly as the image-maker would want to or in some cases as the client wants to.

The most commonly used programs would be from the Corel suite of programs (CorelDRAW), and the Adobe suite of programs (Adobe PhotoShop), besides the two there are quite a few out there, competing to be graded in the same rank as the two above.

These programs are relatively new in the market. These programs really made their presence felt because of the popularity of the Internet, and the World Wide Web. The content on the WWW is mainly constrained by space restrictions, and the time it takes to view the contents of a web page. So web designers came up with a different format for displaying pictures on the WWW.

One of these picture formats is known as the GIF format, this format has become popular also because it can display pictures in a moving form. These are called animated GIFs. The use of animated GIFs is not just restricted to the use of the WWW. Many multimedia artists are finding it a useful tool to put on their products, for different purposes.

There are various GIF maker programs out here, most of them are share ware, which means that you can try them for a certain amount of time, before you buy them. They come packaged, as part of the shareware programs on Computer magazine CDs and some are downloadable from the Internet. Microsoft has also come up with its own GIF maker, called funnily enough Microsoft GIF maker, till the time of writing they were into their version 2.x.

Presentation programs were being used before multimedia became a buzzword in computing. Presentation programs are used to liven up and add pizzazz to an otherwise straight presentation with a few overheads and charts. With a presentation program the speaker can direct attention away from him/her. This helps people who are afraid of big crowds. if the presentation is done with just the right amount of animations and pictures, coupled with sound, then the chances of the audience talking in most of the content will be fairly high. The thing to keep in mind is that you can not only rely on a presentation program alone to get you through a presentation, there has to be sufficient content in it to have the backing of sound and pictures.

Presentation programs are mainly used by sales people, people doing school projects, end of the year meetings, shareholders meeting, etc.

Generally presentation programs run through the computer, and are linked to the overhead projector, it is basically a glorified slide show, with the added sound and moving pictures if so wished.

There are a few presentation programs around, CorelPresents and Microsoft's PowerPoint among the prominent ones.

Authoring software has made life easy for the multimedia developer. A multimedia authoring tool is a general purpose program that lets designers create an interface to navigate multiple media content. Although authoring tools have a lot in common with each other, each one seems to have a special focus. They all handle media types to a differing degree, provide different kinds of interface tools, and are built and programmed in different ways. If you find an authoring tool that does everything you need for a project, you are fortunate. Authoring tools today are generally designed to build interfaces and organize content using three different metaphors - cards and stacks, icons and diagrams, and time and sequences.

Some authoring tools are suited to be presented as a series of cards in stacks or as pages in books. HyperCard and SuperCard for example are particularly good for projects that have large numbers of screens with repetitive elements.

Some tools present an overview of all content and programming as a diagram and look more like an electronic erector set. Autorware from Macromedia is an example for this type. Each element appears as an icon and represents objects like a screen or menu. When an icon is selected, dialog boxes are filled in to give it special properties.

Other tools are essentially time-oriented and act more like drawing or animation programs by providing synchronization of content elements. Macromedia Director with its animation-based environment is an example of an authoring tool in this category.

A good authoring tool will offer features that are useful in building multimedia projects. Some are simple while others have more industrial strength elements. Many authoring tools today are highly visual making them easier to operate having to write scripts and perform other time-consuming tasks.