Know that no one knows the whole Adobe Creative Cloud suite or even a whole Adobe program. Even the people at Adobe. Don’t even try, you perfectionist, you.

Adobe has 20+ apps in CC with more in development.

Most professionals get by with about 20% mastery. The rest we fake or look up. You have Google and YouTube. I used books—two bookshelves’ full, tear-soaked and marked with colored tabs.

The good news is that Adobe never deprecates tools. (They do move them sometimes though.) If you don’t work in Illustrator for five years, for example, you can still get work out the old way, even if there’s a faster way now. Look at the vast improvements in masks, for instance.

The downside to this Adobe practice is bloat. Old features are now hidden under view workspace tabs in the upper right of most programs. A small price to pay, I think.

[However, I finally gave up Dreamweaver out of frustration from bloat. They should scrap it. Five years ago. Muse was supposed to replace DW, but it was such a train wreck, it reached its end of life in 2020. I only know one person who built with it, and she hated it, constantly asking me to help her hack it into submission. XD, despite Adobe’s ridiculous caveats, will never be a full web program. Use WordPress with Divi like I do. Faster. Cleaner. Customizable. And won’t die like Adobe Muse.]