Rufus Deuchler

Sharing a little experiment I've been working on to see how easy it is to get creative with Adobe Edge Animate. I animated the text (Edge Web Fonts) and published it using Adobe Muse, the result can be viewed here: rufus.li/YmmMNY.

This project is leveraging the CSS Blur Filter (which not currently supported by Firefox, IE, and Android browsers). But, because it is HTML it'll show nicely on you iOS devices.

Remember that my background is in print design. So, if I can do it, you can do it too. ;-)

Time to hit the road again. This time around it will be all about Adobe Creative Cloud. The Create Now World Tour will hit over 40 cites worldwide so make sure to check if there's one near you. [http://bit.ly/CreateNow_SM]

As far as I am concerned this is my travel plan:

Together with Jason Levine and Paul Trani.

• Mar 1, Warsaw, Poland (Create Now Stop Warsaw)
• Mar 4, Oslo, Norway (Create Now Oslo stop)
• Mar 5, London, UK (Create Now London stop)
• Mar 6, Stockholm, Sweden (Create Now Stockholm stop)
• Mar 7, Copenhagen, Denmark (Create Now Copenhagen stop)
• Mar 8, Helsinki, Finland (Create Now Helsinki stop)

• Mar 11,  Boston MA,  USA (Central MA Adobe User Group - Boston)
• Mar 14,  Amsterdam,   Holland (Create Now Amsterdam stop)
• Mar 20,  Portland OR,  USA (Portland Digital Designers and Artists)
• Mar 22,  San Diego CA,  USA (AIGA Y-Conference)
• Mar 23,  San Jose CA,  USA (Creative Suite San Jose User Group)
• Apr 2,  Miami FL,  USA  (ADC Awards and Creative Festival)

It was announced last week, and here it is: a special section  in your Creative Cloud - Creative Cloud Training, which includes exclusive videos from experts at Kelby Training, video2brain, Attain and Adobe.

The Training area is divided into the following areas:

Specific Workflows.

• Editing & compositing photos
• Publishing magazines for the iPad
• Creating animation, vector artwork & multimedia for the web
• Developing mobile applications
• Sketching & wireframing on your tablet
• Editing audio & video
• Developing a website
• Packaging mobile applications
• Impoving your productivity
• Creating interactive games
• Geting started with Creative Cloud
• Working with web fonts & colors
• Creating responsive web designs

Creative fields

• Photography
• Graphic design & illustration
• Web design & developement
• Digital publishing
• Audio & video
• Mobile design & development
• Game creation
• Document creation

Adobe products

• DPS (Single Edition)
• Dreamweaver
• Edge Animate
• Edge Inspect
• Fireworks
• Flash Builder
• Flash Player
• Flash Professional
• Ideas
• Illustrator
• InDesign
• Kuler
• Muse
• PhoneGap
• Photoshop
• Photoshop Touch
• Prelude
• Premiere Pro
• Proto
• SpeedGrade
• Story

Enjoy, and Create Now!

For those of you whom missed the Create Now keynote, here it is:

During this keynote presentation I got to show new features in:

• Adobe Photoshop – Big feature updates including Retina Display support, Smart Object support for Liquify, Copy CSS, and Conditional Actions.
• Adobe Muse – Now, you can create mobile versions of your website without writing code.

And here's a little extra that I have prepared:

Adobe Ideas lets you capture and explore ideas in vector format anywhere you go. In this new update there are quite a few features that will make many of you very happy. Let's see what they are:

Three new drawing tools: pencil, brush, marker, and pen tool.

• The new brush tools lets you create marks that vary in thickness depending on the speed you apply to your brush stroke.
   
• The marker (70% transparency by default) lets you draw as if you were working with felt tips.
  
• The pen tool lets you draw as if you were using a calligraphic pen.
  

The ability to rapidly fill closed regions with the paint bucket. Do you remember the times when you had to feverishly paint into larger regions to get them filled with a color? Well, no more.

• The bucket tool lets you fill closed areas with a single click.
  

Ability to duplicate, merge, and flip layers.

• You can now duplicate any layer
• New buttons let you flip selected layers horizontally or verticaly
• A layer can be merged with the layer just below it
  

Ability to compare previous and current colour selection with the eyedropper.

• The eyedropper now shows you the currently selected color and the one you are about to choose from your image, so that you can quickly understand which color you are choosing in context. A neat feature is that the color picker is offset from where your finger/stylys is so that you get a full view.
  

So go to your iOS App Store app and update Adobe Ideas to get all of these cool new features.

Remember that you Adobe Ideas, or *.idea files can be synced over the Adobe Creative Cloud so that you find them on your desktop computer when you get back to the office. Also remember that *.idea files open as vector art in Adobe Illustrator.

So it's this time of the year again... many of you will be producing calendars for yourselves or for your Clients. So I have set myself a little project to make your life easier. But, you will need InDesign CS6 (which is also part of your Creative Cloud Membership) to be able to work with my files, because I am using Liquid Page Rules so that you can easily modify my document to format you like. This is a great example of how Liquid Page Rules can be very useful in your print design projects, and not only for producing layouts for tablet devices. Print FTW! ;-)

Download the InDesign source file here: Calendar 2013 Folder [6.1Mb, ZIP archive]

Here's what I did to create the layout so it is as flexible as possible:

A. Conditional text.
I have included the names of months and days in English, Italian, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, and French. By using conditional text you can choose which language(s) to keep. If you don't see the Conditional Text Panel, go to Window > Type & Tables > Conditional Text.

With all languages on.

With just English, Spanish, Dutch, and Portuguese.

B. Paragraph Styles.
For all texts (months, days, and moons) I have prepared Paragraph Styles which you can symply change from the Paragraph Styles Panel. If you don't see the Paragraph Styles Panel, go to Window > Styles > Paragraph Styles. By opening the styles from the panel you will be able to change the text formatting such as fomnt or size.

Easily change text fromatting from the Paragraph Styles Panel.

C. Object Styles.
All text frames have an Object Style applied to them so you can change their appearance globally. The text frames with the dates in them, for example have an object style that makes their background white and applies a border around the frame itself. By opening the Object Style you can change that color, apply transparency, remove or edit the strokes. If you don't see the Object Styles Panel, go to Window > Styles > Object Styles.

Object Style applied to a Text Frame. To edit the style double click on the style name in the panel. 

And now... the icing on the cake:

D. Liquid Page Rules.
I created the calendar in the horizontal A4 format, but because I applyied Liquid Page Rules you can create alternative layouts at the format or orientation you need.

The original document as you will find it.

When using the Page Tool (in the InDesign Toolbox) you can manually change the size of the page to see how it resizes:

As you can see above, the elements on the page resize exactly as they should, based on the choice I made in the Liquid Layout Panel. If you don't see the Liquid Layout Panel, go to Layout > Liquid Layout.

To create an alternate layout with your orientation and dimensions, use the menu in the Pages Panel and choose "Create Alternate Layout...", enter the new dimensions, hit enter, et voilà! Of course you may have to do some tweaking, like adjusting text formatting (Paragraph Styles Panel), object formatting (Object Styles Panel), etc...

For each month you can place your own images. The frame has been set to scale for when the size or orientation changes.

Feel free to experiment with my calendar and use it for your projects. Let me know if you do.

Enjoy!

Disclaimer: I have been very careful in checking dates and moon phases during the creation of this calendar, I cannot however be held responsible if there are errors or inconsistencies. Thanks, for your understanding.

In my presentations I always talk about 3D in Adobe Photoshop CS6 Extended and how easy it is to create extrusions of selections, type, or paths directly in the application. What I did here was to go under the menu item 3D > Get more content... (Adobe® Photoshop Extended® 3D content) and got myself a 3D model of a hot air balloon. 

Then, simply by changing textures and lights (colour and position), I was able top create that rather realistic image of a hot air balloon peacefully hovering over the Pilanesberg National Park at sunset.

[Click on the image for a slightly larger version]

Try it for yourself and let me know about what you come up with.

Created with Adobe Configurator 3 (from Adobe Labs), the InDesign Features panel lets you easily explore, try out and learn the new and enhanced tools and features in InDesign CS6. Arranged in a series of tabs, from the panel you can check out the new tools and features.

The panel is free and exclusively available on Adobe Exchange. To download it you will need the Adobe Exchange panel which currently works with 9 different CS6 applications.

Enjoy!

The Adobe Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition enables designers to easily publish content created with Adobe InDesign as an app 
on the iPad without writing code.

As of today (September 18, 2012), Adobe Creative Cloud Members can create an 
unlimited number of Single Edition 
apps at no additional cost. For those of you who are not Creative Cloud Members, Single Edition is available for purchase as a standalone product. Here's the original Blog post on Adobe.com.

Digital Publishing Suite Single Edition offers:

• Streamlined workflow tailored to Designers Rapid preview and testing directly to iPad, including all interactivity, via the USB port.
• The ability to design and build one App that is optimized for High Definition (new iPad) and Standard Definition (iPad 1+2).
• The ability to update Single Edition App after it has been submitted to (and approved by) App store.

In short, you can now use Adobe InDesign to author layouts, add interactivity, preview and create Folio files (Folio files are a series of Articles). Then you use the new DPS App Builder to create a cutom viewer for the iPad, and then you can download a developer App for testing and a distribution App to submit to Apple App Store.

Check this out for more information on Adobe Digital Publishing Suite, Single Edition.