Yesterday, Adobe evangelists Rufus Deuchler, Greg Rewis and Jason Levine gave a talk about Adobe CS3 and its integrated workflow. It was a rather entlightening experience as I’ve always been a Macromedia user and now after its acquisition by Adobe, it’s great that it’s fully integrated with the Adobe products.
The biggest advantage for me at least is that Dreamweaver, Fireworks and Flash are fully integrated with Adobe Photoshop. Since most web designers design and do their mocks in Photoshop, it’s easier for me now to just open that Photoshop file in Fireworks when I need to slice stuff. I don’t but I really prefer using Fireworks when slicing or when creating my rollover buttons. It also optimses images for the web a whole lot better as Greg demonstrated. He also gave some tips on translating visuals done in Photoshop and putting it onto Dreamweaver via copy paste. Pretty handy if time is of the essence. Too bad he wasn’t able to cover AJAX since his machine started to go haywire in the middle of his talk. And it was great how he and Jason was able to work the crowd in spite of the technical difficulties.
Rufus discussed a lot of stuff about designing in CS3 and several unused tools like the Appearance Panel in Illustrator which lets you be more creative with typography. He also mentioned Kuler, a tool for helping designers come up with color schemes. It has a desktop counterpart so you can easily search for color schemes then add them to your swatches in whatever CS3 app you want. he use of graphic styles was also emphasized as it promotes the why create things you can reuse. It’s pretty much also the concept behind CSS. InDesign now also has regular expressions and it has a visual tool that helps you form regular expressions so you can search and replace a whole lot of text. The example he used is switching dates from mm/dd to dd-mm. THe also showed how to do pseudo-3d manipulations in Photoshop. Goodbye Skew.
Jason further discussed about video within CS3. For simple stuff you can use Photoshop Extended now to edit your video. Things like putting your water mark and animating them, putting captions and all that, you can now do inside of Photoshop Extended without having the need for After Effects. He also shared the puppet pin tool in After Effects which you can use to practically move still pictures to create video. I think among the three, he was really the most entertaining, probably because he’s the youngest so he’s a lot more goofy.
Overall, the whole day was great. The main theme they were all conveying is that if you plan good enough you won’t waste time when revisions come in (which is the norm as far as I know). CS3 is just a tool if you don’t have a good workflow or framework in using it you still won’t get the full benefits of the integration between apps.
The “evangelists” really knew their stuff and they were very good speakers that you practically don’t get idle time. They knew when and how to throw jokes to keep the crowd listening. Thanks Rufus, Greg and Jason for a very entertaining day.
omg. i’m so jealous!
(doesn’t know what to say, only knows that she would have drooled in typical geek fashion)
Hi scrufus, thanks for the very positive post. We had a lot of fun in Singapore. Is your name Rufus too?
Take care,
Rufus
@yin: it’s fun to be a geek.
@Rufus: you’re welcome. i surmise everyone had a lot of fun. i wish it were but it’s just a nickname my younger brother calls me. thanks for visiting
it’s an honor.