Rufus Deuchler

It has really become very easy to create seamless repeating patterns in Adobe Illustrator CS6.

In this video I will show you how to create a repeating Japanese pattern using just three circles and the new pattern creation tools.

Patterns made like this can then be used in your illustrations, layouts, or even as tiles in the background of your web pages.

Enjoy!

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.

• 15/2 Helsinki
• 16/2 Stockholm
• 20/2 Gothenburg
• 21/2 Copenhagen
• 22/2 Århus

Register here for Finland,  Sweden, or Denmark. 

This will be fun!

To begin this year of travel, I will show up at some of the Cut&Paste events in Europe.

• London: Postponed (stay tuned)
• Berlin: February 2
• Helsinki: February 4

I have a slot in the "Show&Tell Presentations" and there will be an exciting Adobe Ideas challenge as well. In a 15-minute offstage round, designers will sketch a graphic that represents an activity they would do to raise money for clean water using the iPad and Adobe Ideas app. The winner from all global entries receives the opportunity to work on a charity: water campaign.

Please make sure to say hi if you are around.

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

This video will show you how to create a website using Adobe Muse (Code Name), from the initial idea to the published site. The whole workflow.

The four steps I am covering here are:

1. Planning the site using the Plan workspace
2. Designing with freedom using Muse's InDesign layout metaphor
3. Adding rich interactivity with widgets and arbitrary HTML or iFrames
4. Publishing your website to HTML or using Adobe Business Catalyst

If you want to follow along and do what I am doing, here are the assets I used: IntroMuse.zip [3.2Mb]

To check out what I have created in this video, see this website on Adobe Business Catalyst: http://ourplanet.businesscatalyst.com

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.

The workflow to create such interactive documents has become increasingly simple over the past months and with Adobe now offering a solution for Single Editions, it has become easier than ever to get your content out there. Now, there’s only one thing left to do, get creative and get your ideas out there. Now you can do that very easily and cost effectively.

Single Edition for iPad and Professional Edition, Monthly should be available in North America at the end of November. They will be available in other geographies in 2012 – stay tuned for more specific information.

Remember that in the meantime you can create and share as many folios as you need using the Folio Builder Panel in InDesign CS5/5.5 to create your Folios, move articles around, add metadata and share your work with whomever you want. Your colleagues or customers will need a free Adobe ID and the free Adobe Content Viewer App to view your work on their tablet devices. It’s as easy as that. Once you are ready to actually distribute or sell your document as an App, you will be taken through a series of steps that will guide you through the Viewer Builder Service and you will be good to go.

For more information about the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, please click here.

Addendum: please read this blog entry if you are interested in how it all works.

Follow me as I jump from one feature to the other in Adobe InDesign, some older and some new. See what you may be missing if you are not yet using InDesign CS5.5.

In this episode of CSInsider|Design I am covering the following five features:

• IDML - InDesign Markup Language for backward compatibility (CS4/5/5.5)
• The Pathfinder Panel (CS4)
• Linked text (CS5)
• Gridified tools and super step-and-repeat (CS5)
• Presentation Mode and Page Transitions (CS5)

I you are unsure about when what feature was introduced make sure to check these out:

• The Adobe InDesign new features cheat sheet (CS3 to CS5.5)
• The Adobe Illustrator new features cheat sheet (CS3 to CS5)
• The Adobe Photoshop new features cheat sheet (CS3 to CS5)

A few weeks back I was investigating ways to rapidly create full 360° panoramas. Specifically I was interested in creating cubic panoramas to be included in a digital publication with InDesign and the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, and I had no intention to invest in expensive equipent for that. After all I just wanted to test it.

Searching the interwebs I came across this cool company: Pixeet. Their offer includes a specifically designed fisheye lens for the iPhone or iPad (or any other device with a camera) and a really easy to use application to take the four pictures necessary to create the panorama. So I ordered it.

Here's the result of my first test:

That is pretty neat no? It only took four pictures with the fisheye attached to my iPhone 4.

There is one thing that annoys me and that Pixeet promises to fix. Currently you have to upload your images to the cloud for stitching, an internet connection is therefore required to complete the process. However, Pixeet wrote that they are working on a new version of the app that will stich the images on the device.

After you have uploaded your panorama, you can download an equirectangular or stripped cubic image, or even a QuickTime VR of it. You could then separate the cubic images with Photoshop or use an application like Pano2VR to create the 6 images needed for InDesign, which I did for my test. So, as far as my test on using such a panorama in an InDesign Document to be published with the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, it works just fine!

I shall continue in these investigations. Stay tuned.