Results tagged “adobe”

As I type this, my machine is dutifully installing “Adobe® Creative Suite® 5 Production Premium”. Adobe is a company that enjoys a stranglehold over the design and publishing industries (try applying for a job in an agency listing “CorelDraw” and “The Gimp” on your CV and see how far you get), so why – oh why? – is their visual communication frequently, face-smackingly, awful?

The Read Me document that came with Production Suite has been typed up in Microsoft Word (truly! I checked), their logo a low-quality JPEG paste job, the type set in crushingly dull Times New Roman. Sure, I’m aware that they won’t be submitting their Read Me documents to any design awards. But considering it’s their customers’ first impression of software that they’ve just splashed more than a grand on, I don’t think it’s too much to ask that they run it by an eager junior designer with a copy of InDesign to spruce up. At least then they’d be using their own product.

Update: Todd Kopriva of Adobe replied to this post. He writes:

… the ReadMe documents are handled by overworked program managers who have approximately zero time between when the features and bug fixes and known issues are settled and the document needs to go off to be translated. The idea of spending any time to make them look good would be met with either guffaws or questions about one’s sanity. Just today, one such program manager said to me that no one reads the ReadMe documents, anyway. That’s why people like me (in Technical Support) end up making posts like this one.

And don’t make fun of my aesthetics. It’s hard enough to get all of the information out in time without having to be self-conscious about design. ;-)

I stand enlightened. So, rather than making fun of Todd’s aesthetics, let us close the book on the troubling mystery of why Adobe’s Read Me files aren’t as beautiful as they could be, and be grateful that we have up-to-date and pertinent information instead of purty columns and fonts. Gracias, Todd!

Scripting maestro Lloyd Alvarez has relaunched his site for all things After Effects, aescripts.com. The new system looks set to become After Effects’ de facto repository for scripts, and implements a “suggested donation” feature so that the scriptwriters can (hopefully) get compensated for their hard work. I’m delighted that Lloyd has offered to host Ease and Wizz over there, so the download link will be over at http://aescripts.com/ease-and-wizz/, but I’ll continue to mirror the content on ianhaigh.com so that all the old links don’t get broken.

Also, check out this intro video I made for Ease and Wizz. I just can’t get enough of that Dr Strangelove type.

Some great tips for Adobe CS4 apps, courtesy of Layers Magazine.

Via John Nack on Adobe.

With an introduction video that seems to suggest Flash Catalyst is no less than a fundamental building block of life in our universe, Adobe are once again attempting to bridge the yawning divide between designers and developers. Catalyst is available in Adobe Labs now, and lets you add interactivity and interaction to otherwise static Illustrator and Photoshop documents, as well as aiding developers and designers working in parallel on large scale applications.

Sato Hiroyuki has had these Illustrator scripts available for years, but now they’ve got English descriptions. There are some handy little scripts here, including several that improve on similar functions available in the application itself (such as “Round Any Corner” and “Divide”).

The Dance script, however, is by far the best. From the description:

adds a new layer and draws dancing people on it

Via John Nack on Adobe.

Filter Forge is a plugin for Photoshop that lets you build your own filters. It’s visual and node-based. You can download almost 6,000 filters that the community have developed, and if you submit your own, even earn a free license. The examples are actually pretty good (as opposed to endless variations on bevel and emboss).

Filter Forge. I think we need something like this for After Effects …

Via John Nack on Adobe.

From none other than the Adobe Illustrator team themselves … a blog called Infinite Resolution. Because you can, erm, zoom in on it. Forever.

Via John Nack on Adobe.

I’m pleased to announce version 2.0 of Ease and Wizz, the After Effects palette for smoother easing. It’s an adaptation of Robert Penner’s easing equations for Flash, and gives you more options when you’re tweening values such as position, rotation, or scale.

The big change in this version is that now you can tween along a curved motion path, which was previously impossible (the expression would effectively ignore the bezier curves, and the resulting motion path would be linear). Also, you can now apply easing expressions to mask paths and shape paths.

I call this monumental addition … “Curvaceous”.

Note that when using Curvaceous, you will no longer have access to Back and Elastic tweening. The (slightly techie) explanation for this that rather than tweening the actual value of the property, Curvaceous tweens the time of the property, using the valueAtTime method. As the Back and Elastic easing types actually overshoot the original keyframes, Curvaceous has no way of knowing how to extrapolate the extra data to move past the last value. Simply turn off Curvaceous if you require Back or Elastic (the palette updates when you toggle Curvaceous, so you don’t need to commit this to memory).

http://ianhaigh.com/easeandwizz/

Hope you find it useful!

Ease and Wizz, my adaptation of Flash easing equations for use with Adobe After Effects, broke with the release of After Effects CS4. However, thanks to Adobe’s free trials, I’ve managed to get it working again.

You can grab Ease and Wizz 1.12 here.

Well, that didn’t take too long. The best new feature is now you can tell the expressions to affect all the keyframes instead of just the first two. The palette layout is a bit nicer, too. Grab it while it’s hot.

Ease and Wizz is a suite of expressions for After Effects. I’ve adapted Robert Penner’s easing equations to work with After Effects, and added a palette so they’re really easy to use. Grab Ease and Wizz and give it a go!