Jun 142013
 

Last time we looked at an introduction to the Perspective Grid. Today, I’d like to show you how to adjust the objects whilst still keeping your perspective.

Let’s start with doing a drawing, which is not in perspective and then converting it so that it is in perspective.

We’re going to draw a simple window. To make things easier, I’ve grouped all the objects within this.

 

Basic Window

Basic Window

 

Now bring up your Perspective Grid, by clicking on the Grid Tool in the toolbar.

Choose the plane from the gizmo, you’d like to put the window into.

Jun 102013
 
Initial Grid

Initial Grid

 

The most important part of the Perspective Grid, is knowing how to get rid of the jolly thing when you don’t want it!

 

There are 2 ways to get rid of it.

 

If you are in the Perspective Grid tool, you can go along to the little gizmo that sits in the top left hand corner

Gizmo

Gizmo

 

If you click the little x in the top left hand corner of this gizmo, this will remove the Perspective Grid from your artboard.

 

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:

  • 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.
 Posted by on May 15, 2013
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

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.

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…

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

text render 1

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

 

text render 2

text render 2

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

Simple InDesign layout

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.

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.

May 072013
 

MAX_DayOne-300x194Probably 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.

 Posted by on May 7, 2013