How much ram and processing power in my imac will meet my graphic design needs?

Hi,
I'm in the market for a new imac. I'm trying to figure out how much ram I'll need and which processor will be sufficient for my graphic design needs.
I'm gonna need it to be robust enough to have InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator open at once along with spotify, safari with many tabs open, and a couple other apps including evernote and game from time to time. Also, I'm gonna be managing a good deal of fonts in font explorer. How much ram and processing power will I need in my imac to keep everything snappy with all these apps going at the same time?
Any advice on this would be much appreciated. Feel free to include any other relevant information you think I should know.
Thanks, Nick

Computers are out of date when you open the box
Ok, getting serious, that iMac should be a viable workhorse for what you want for a good five years, and taht depends on how much ram you put in it, add really fast external storage, and so on.
Didn't throw this in earlier so as to not influence the discussion: my daughter is the senior art director, VP, at a graphics design firm in NYC. Has been in the business for a number of years. When she changed out her Mac at work, bought, or company bought, the 27" iMac model just before the latest, with maxed out CPU/GPU, and storage. They maxed the memory to 32 GB for her, then added a 30" Apple cinema display so she has almost 5' of display in front of her. There is nothing she cannot have open all spread across that display area. She works almost exclusively in print media, occassionally condescends to do web stuff. And has a massive array of RAID drives hanging on it. But that is a setup an individual would be hard pressed to go with.
At home she uses a MacBook Pro with top cpu and display but that is all.
The point, just how massive do you want to go depends on how fast you have to work; in the office where time is money you need tons of horsepower. At home, you scale it to your abilitty to juggle other tasks at the same time.
I think your choices have been great, the discussion has focused on what is important and especially what can and cannot be changed in the future.
Best of luck setting this up.

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ANSWER: All you give it, lol!
I posted this for those buying or building a PC and are deciding "how much RAM do I need?"
I built a fairly powerful rig for Photoshop and editing in Premiere Pro, and without all the tech specs, I have 24GB of ram, mostly for encoding HiDef video. Surely Photoshop wouldn't eat THAT much, right? Dead wrong. I have Photoshop set to utilize 75% of my available ram which would be near 19GB. I just worked on a fairly large image, where I took 23 vertical shots with my 5D Mark II (5616x3744 resolution files, pretty big) and did a large photomerge which ended up at about 60,000 x 5,500 after the crop. Granted, large image, nearly 3½GB .PSB file. So while the merging and aligning was taking place, I watched my Ram Gadget soar, right up to 19GB within 4 minutes of processing:
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I purposely waited to respond so I wouldn't write things I'd regret later:
"Nice system."
Huh? I didn't list my system on purpose. The point wasn't showing off gear, it was PS's use of RAM.
"With regard to RAM and Photoshop, people often say more is better without qualification, and you have just confirmed that advice."
You actually have no evidence of my qualifications. I'll send you a link to my Microsoft transcript if you'd like, there are 16 certifications you can peruse.
"Personally, with 24 GB of RAM I'd suggest settting Photoshop's limit even higher - e.g., to 95% (which is what I use for 8 GB) ... The OS doesn't need much on that scale."
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If anyone is reading this please PLEASE don't set your Photoshop limit to 95% of your available ram. Your system will mostly likely crash within minutes of starting Photoshop. The proven setting is 75%, set it there and move on. Thanks.

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How much ram and processing power in my imac will meet my graphic design needs?

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