Creative Suite Workspaces

 InDesign, Uncategorized  No Responses »
Jan 312012
 

Another often overlooked aspect of most Creative Suite apps is their ability to store preset panel combinations. Adobe call these workspaces and they can be extremely useful for rapidly loading specific panel sets or just carrying out general tidying up.

Workspaces can be found in two locations: under the View>Workspaces drop down menu or, in the Application bar on the right hand side.

Screenshot of InDesign workspace switcher

InDesign workspace switcher

I this example I’m using InDesign. The current workspace (Essentials) is displayed in the application bar next to the search field. Click on the downward triangle to see a list of preset workspaces (this is known as the workspace switcher).  Read more...

Chameleon Illustrator – Re-Colouring Artwork

 Illustrator  No Responses »
Jan 312012
 
Screen Shot 2012-01-31 at 12.10.39

Let’s start at the end; or even the middle. You might be working on a piece of artwork in Adobe Illustrator but then decide the colours need to be changed. Perhaps something is the wrong tone; perhaps all the places a certain colour appears need to be changed to a completely different colour; or maybe the entire artwork needs to be changed! Do not fret and don’t go reaching for your swatches! We will not be needing those. Instead we will be making use of Illustrator’s ‘Re-colour Artwork’ tool.  Read more...

 Posted by on January 31, 2012

Clipping Masks – Don’t Colour Outside the Lines.

 Photoshop  1 Response »
Jan 202012
 

In the previous masking tutorial (found here) we looked at how to use some of Photoshops masking tools. But now we will look at a new kind of mask, the Clipping Mask.

So let’s start playing with this tool. Here I have a background and a line of text. What I would love is for the background texture to fill only the text area. This can be done with standard masks in just a few clicks, but with two clicks it can be one with clipping masks.

(1st click) Move text under the texture.  Read more...

Apps for your workflow: Inkpad (iPad)

 Illustrator  No Responses »
Jan 182012
 

So you’ve got your hands on a shiny new iPad? Or perhaps Santa left you with some money that would go towards apps on iTunes? Or maybe you really just want something to enhance your workflow.  It doesn’t matter, this app needs to be checked out.
Imagine Adobe Illustrator, strip it down to its core features and add a layer of touch controls tuned for the iPad – now you have Inkpad. With some time you can create some beautiful vector works. I use it for only smaller pieces but, as shown below, the developers show below a mushroom drawn entirely from the app. In this post I will be discussing the pros and cons of this very interesting app as an enhancement to your workflow.  Read more...

Boxoffice for iPad

 HTML5, InDesign  1 Response »
Jan 132012
 

Here’s another interesting DPS generated iPad app I downloaded recently. Boxoffice is a movie industry weekly magazine. It features the usual range of industry news & gossip, celebrity interviews and film previews. I think the Boxoffice design team has made very interesting use of the features of DPS to make an engaging and genuinely entertaining app.

Screenshot of Boxoffice cover 1

Boxoffice cover 1

Boxoffice makes use of DPS’s horizontal and vertical layouts to create two entirely different covers for each edition. Just rotate to switch between them. This theme is repeated in various locations in the magazine.

Screenshot of Boxoffice cover 2

Boxoffice cover 2  Read more...

Mouse positioning and movement around FMR slides

 Captivate  No Responses »
Jan 082012
 

When you are recording (in either manual or automatic mode) and you perform a drag-and-drop operation, Captivate creates a special Full Motion Recording (FMR) slide.  This slide has a small black camcorder icon (I actually think it looks more like a bugle!) beneath it in the resulting Filmstrip.  Instead of a static screenshot, its background is an animation that shows the drag-and-drop action.

In Captivate 5.x, you may notice some rather strange things happening to the mouse position and movement within the two slides that precede and follow the FMR slide:  Read more...

JavaScript animation – using EaselJS pt 2

 HTML5  No Responses »
Jan 062012
 

In this post I am continuing my foray into Easel.js. Here I am now actually displaying and animating pictures. So this post is about JavaScript animation – using EaselJS pt 2. We will be making this…

EaselJS animation v1

EaselJS animation v1

 

…and it will be the car that is moving across the screen.

Again you need to make up a simple html5 page and link to the easljs library…

<script src=”easel.js”></script>

First you need to create a stage and link it to your canvas element…

var page = document.getElementById(“canvas”);
var stage = new Stage(page);  Read more...