For altering logo's, symbols black and white stuff etc. Illustrator
For designing layout's and general graphic design i reckon the best is Quark Express. I used to use corel draw and adobe pagemaker but i found quark more to my liking.
If you have a graphics tablet, i recommend getting corel painter for creating more artistic images. Interface is very similar to photoshop but it has 10 times the amount of brush effects. A very cool program if you use it the right way.