What’s new in Creative Cloud

Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Uncategorized No Responses »

May 152013

With Adobe’s recent announcement that Creative Cloud is to now supersede Creative Suite, we thought it might be nice to take a look at some of the new features that have been publicly announced as coming in Creative Cloud, especially in the main design packages.

Photoshop CC

Some of the new features announced in Photoshop CC include: Read more...

Camera shake reduction – helps to reduce motion blur in your photos.
Smart Sharpen – analyses images to produce the best possible sharpening, while minimising halos and noises.
Adobe Camera Raw 8 means edits can be applied as a filter to any layer or file.

The Baker ebook framework

HTML5, InDesign No Responses »

May 132013

Recently I blogged about exporting to html5 from InDesign using the in5 plugin. Looking through the various options that this plug-in gave me was an output option to something called the Baker framework.

The Baker framework logo

This was not something I had come across before, so I thought I would look it up and see what it was all about. The Baker framework is an html5 ebook framework, specifically designed for publishing ebooks on iOS devices, using open web standards. Since these devices use the webkit rendering engine you can add audio, video, and animations within your ebook pages. Leveraging CSS3 you can change your layout in a responsive way, so that your ebook works in portrait or landscape modes. The framework itself is open source, using the BSD license. Read more...

Exporting to HTML5 from InDesign pt5 – meta tags

HTML5, InDesign No Responses »

May 132013

Running on from my last post on using the in5 plugin to export to HTML5, I noticed that when you chose as an output the iPad web app option, testing this in your browser on your iPad produced an interesting result. The pages were all in fullscreen mode, and they were locked that way. You could not see the normal browser buttons etc, you were fully immersed in the set of pages that you exported. This was interesting, and I guessed that it must be due some meta tags that were telling the browser what to do. Looking at the source code, here are the meta tags created when you export… Read more...

Exporting to HTML5 from InDesign pt3

HTML5, InDesign No Responses »

May 072013

Running on from my last post, where I was using the excellent in5 plugin for exporting to html5, I wanted to mention a couple of the options within the export panels. The first is the text rendering setting.This is in the Basic area of the export panel, and previously I had set this to Images (preserves exact appearance). This means that the titles that I used looked right, but were images…

text render 1

But look what happens when I set this to HTML with local font embedding (where possible)…

text render 2 Read more...

Exporting to HTML5 from InDesign pt2

HTML5, InDesign No Responses »

May 072013

In a previous post I talked about a lovely new InDesign extension called in5. It exported to html5 beautifully. But I had only tried it with simple layout and colours. Now I am going to follow on from that example but I am going to export 5 pages instead, and I am going to add some content. First off here is my original sample from previously…

Simple InDesign layout Read more...

HTML5 game development – a new course

HTML5 No Responses »

May 072013

I am currently in the process of creating a new course (which is always great fun). This time round it will be on HTML5 game development. HTML5 has come a long way since we started training it 3 years ago, so now I feel is the time to create a game development course using html5, css3, and JavaScript. In order to develop games, though, I will uses a few JavaScript libraries to make training easier. There are more and more JavaScript libraries out there, specifically for game development, that it makes sense to use a couple of them. Here I am going to introduce some of the libraries that I have come across. I have not finally decided on which ones to use yet, but I plan to make three types of games in the html5 5 Games Development course. Read more...

Exporting to HTML5 from InDesign

HTML5, InDesign No Responses »

May 072013

Having done a lot of HTML5 work in recent years, I was looking for a quick way to export my information from various applications that I use all the time. Today I am going to show you how to export from InDesign to HTML5. Exporting to html is easy, unfortunately the current export command is very poor. In order for me to export to HTML5 from InDesign properly I am going to use a lovely extensions called in5. This is not free, but if you need to get your content out to a web-based format quickly, especially into html5, then this is a very useful tool. Read more...

Adobe dropping Creative Suite, it’s all about Creative Cloud

DreamWeaver, Illustrator, InDesign, Photoshop, Uncategorized No Responses »

May 072013

Probably one of the biggest announcements to come out of Adobe MAX so far, is the news that Creative Suite is being replaced with Creative Cloud. This means in the future you won’t buy licences of Creative Suite, instead you will subscribe to Creative Cloud to access all the same products.

So what does this mean? Here are some answers we have pulled together to try and help you get to grips with this change:

Do I still install the software?

Yes you still install all the products and they will be run locally on your machine. The products simply check back with Adobe’s servers once within every 30 day period to ensure your subscription is valid. Read more...

Illustrator CS6 – Amazing New Pattern Tool

Illustrator No Responses »

Mar 182013

One of the most amazing new features of CS6 Illustrator is the new pattern tool. It’s surprisingly easy to use, so let’s go ahead!

The first thing I’m going to do is create the shape I want to use for the pattern and I’ve created just a very quick flower shape, which I have dragged and dropped into the swatches panel. Do make sure that your shape, you’re going to use, doesn’t already contain a pattern.

Initial Shape into Swatches

Basic Pattern

Pattern Options Panel

Brick Offset Option

Change Overlap

Quick Overview of the Amazing New Pattern Tool … that Adobe should have introduced many years ago!

Illustrator No Responses »

Feb 282013

As many of you, who have been creating patterns know, creating a decent repetition in Illustrator has always been a lot of hard work. Trying to make your pattern not look too rigid, did require creating a number of copies of the object to be ‘patterned’, offset them, draw a rectangle around the area to be repeated and sending it to the back! If your rectangle was not absolutely perfect your repeat would not look right and you would have weird overlaps.

All this is now gone with the new Pattern Tool. Read more...

Older Entries