Me and my colleague Terry White will be touring Finland, Sweden and Denmark for a series of events that will show the latest developements in Adobe Creative Suite Design Premium, including Muse, Digital Publishing Suite, and the Touch Apps.
Register here for Finland, Sweden, or Denmark.
This will be fun!
Dear friends near and far,
I herewith send you my most sincere wishes for a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year 2012. It shall be grand. For sure!
"The clouds, the only birds that never sleep".
Victor Hugo, The Vanished City.
You all take care,
Rufus
It's been quite a while since I wanted to do something with Adobe Ideas that went beyond just doodling. Some impressive work has been produced with this app (check out this Flickr Group for example); I needed to see for myself. Adobe Ideas lets you draw on the go, and the drawings you create with it are in fact vector graphics.
I thought who is better to inspire me on this new experiment that the father of vector graphics himself? John Warnock it was. I mailed myself a picture of him and saved it to my Photos on the iPad, and then added a Photo layer in Ideas to have a base upon which to draw. Then it was just a matter of defining light and dark areas (you know the drill). To have more precision (beyond the thickness of my fingers) I used the Wacom Bamboo Stylus and added strokes and areas of varying widths, and also used the eraser to gain control over negative space. The experience was actually quite relaxing and it took me just under two hours to create this:
Why would I do this with Adobe Ideas, you ask? Well, the awesome thing about Ideas is that it is a tablet application, and I could have done that drawing anywhere and on the go, in the garden, on a plane, or in my bed. The result can then easily be transferred to Adobe Illustrator (for example) to be refined.
Here's the file I emailed myself from Ideas. But I am pretty sure that I will continue working on it as time goes by. That's another interesting thing about the app, you have your drawings with you on the tablet, and you can work on them whenever you feel inspired.
This morning I got inspired by a tweet from my colleague Greg Rewis, which linked to this post. It is a an image entirely created with CSS3 transformations.
Very cool, I thought to myself. How about doing an illustration myself. I mean, we have the ideal tool for that, and it's called Adobe Edge Preview which is available on Labs. Admittedly, Edge is a web motion and interaction tool that uses web standards like HTML5, CSS3 and JavaScript. But it allowed me to do these illustrations:
It's pretty cool to see what can be done just with a few reactangles, rounded corners, transparencies, and transformations.
Check out the HTML result here.
Addendum: some people have been asking about the original Edge file, here it is.
Originally posted on the Adobe blogs.
As a worldwide Design Evangelist at Adobe Systems, I travel the World to showcase and explain Adobe solutions to Creative Suite users and I get to meet hundreds of designers in person. InDesign is their weapon choice when it comes to creating beautiful layouts independently of how they will be published, and the Digital Publishing Suite always generates great interest among audiences.
The Folio Producer tools in InDesign CS5 and CS5.5 enable designers to create interactive content on top of their layouts (overlays) and publish these to tablet devices. It’s so easy that it’s almost too good to be true. However, in the past, when the discussion moved over to the costs of the service, it became difficult for designers to experiment any further. That was because DPS Professional Edition and Enterprise Edition have rather high upfront and subscription fees, costs which make perfect sense if you are in the business of creating many folios for your customers, or if you are a publishing house and want more control, or if you need enterprise grade features to distribute, control, and publish your content.
The question I then heard most frequently, was “I am a freelance designer and I just want to publish a few folios for my customers, is there a solution for that?” or “I work for a school and we just need to create one catalogue each year”.
Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition answers these very questions: you can now create your folio and pay a one time fee (through the Adobe Store) and have your Folio transformed into an App that can then be distributed over at the Apple App Store.
Continue reading "Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition, the solution for the rest of us" »
