You could try with Adobe Fireworks. It gets you a "good" design (at least, up to a certain point) and it's more easy to manage and faster than with Photoshop.

There are lots of cheaper alternatives and some open source solutions. Just depends on what OS you're running.

Windows. Which makes everything a bit worse.

Not that I'm a designer or know what I'm talking about, but a few years ago I switched from doing all of my graphics work in The Gimp to all scalable vector graphics in Inkscape, and couldn't be happier.

It's a different method altogether, and skills from one don't pass to the other, but once you get the SVG tricks down you can do a lot of tremendously complicated designs with little effort, and the master copy is a breeze to work with. Modifications and post-processing manipulations become cheap operations.

It's a little unstable outside of Linux, but does run on OS X and Windows. On OS X, it crashes pretty often but recovers cleanly.