Picture the scene: it's the year 2000 and computers have taken over the world. Humans are grey and lifeless beings, robbed of their creativity and individuality. Computers are everywhere in a Big Brother kind of way. There are many ironies at work with this classic science-fiction opener. Computers are indeed everywhere, but rather than deny creativity they actually encourage it.

The examples are all around us. That billboard ad you gaze at in boredom was designed on a computer. The new office block across the road will have been drawn-up on a computer, as will the cars zooming past you. Reading a magazine? The visuals come courtesy of a computer running Quark Xpress.

As with most industries, computers were adopted by creative people because they made things easier and faster. Rather than having to erase a contour by hand, with an eraser made out of India rubber, the architect can simply click Undo. The difference? The first takes half a minute and the latter half a second.

More time to work means more time to be creative. Not only that but the innovative tools programmers gave art programs lead to new types of creativity - do you think new cars would look the same if a computer wasn't taking care of the aerodynamics?

The categories of 'art programs' are simple. The first distinction is between 2D or 3D. 3D art programs are generally based around computer aided-design - drawing and designing objects, such as cubes or spheres, many of which combined together are then turned into 3D representations.

2D art packages come in bitmap and vector varieties. Bitmap programs are like traditional art - when you draw a line, it's recorded by the computer like ink on a canvas. With vector art programs, by contrast, the start and end point of the line are recorded but not the line itself. This means that a saved file from a vector art package is nothing more than a lot of co-ordinates, whereas a bitmap art package's file is a mass of pixels.

Bitmap packages are generally used for image editing (i.e. touching-up photographs), while vector packages find uses in illustrations - the diagram of a train crash you see in your daily tabloid will have been knocked-up on a vector art program. Whatever the case, you can't buy packages that fall strictly into one camp or another. Most art programs are a hotchpotch that merely lean more towards one than the other.

Adobe virtually invented the art program scene and is occupying the niche so well that even Microsoft won't take it on. Adobe Illustrator and Photoshop are standard features of any artistic person's Macintosh (here we encounter another curious fact: creative types tend to use Apple Macintosh computers rather than PCs. Perhaps they just want to get the work done).

If you're thinking of buying an art package then you need to think about what you actually want to do. Adobe Photoshop is arguably the best bitmap editor in the world, but will set you back several hundred quid. If you merely want to touch-up photographs then their PhotoDeluxe program is a far cheaper (and more user friendly) choice, and there are worthy competitors too, such as MGI's PhotoSuite and Jasc Paint Shop Pro.

With the growth of the Internet, computer art has experienced a renaissance. The Web is primarily a visual medium (although on this particular site we incline more towards low-bandwidth text than pictures). Companies like Adobe were keen to adapt their current software to take into account Internet file formats such as JPEG and GIF. Other companies such as Macromedia embraced the Web wholeheartedly and invented new forms of animation and art programs; Shockwave and Flash both bolster the Web's reputation as a completely individual medium.