If you’re not a designer – you don’t know…

And if you are – I don’t need to explain it for you…

I am excited for CS4.

You may ask why since I never bought CS3.

When I went to learn about CS3 in a workshop at USF’s St Pete Campus, it seemed like a few minor updates were made. I must say, being able to Place multiple objects at once in InDesign is rocking cool, but not $2500 rocking cool.

But yesterday Kelly and I watched the Adobe® Creative Suite® 4 Web Broadcast.

Here’s some of what I learned from Adobe:

- 500 million TVs will have internet access by 2011

- over 98% of PCs have Flash player installed

- there are now over 25 million Adobe Air installations

- CS4 has 13 products (Photoshop, Illustrator, etc.), 14 technologies (Bridge, Encore, etc.) and 7 services (kuhler, in context pdf editing, etc.) Why? Because Adobe understands that the expectation is higher these days for engaging interactive content. Which means “we the design people” need the tools to be able to create that engaging content – and having more of them in one box will sure help sell that box!

The upgrades in CS4 include time savers, better Macromedia integration, new technologies and innovation.

They had some designers explain in “their own words” what is so great about CS4. First Ben Grossman spoke about the video end of things. His projects include work for Sin City, BMW, ESPN and Radiohead… and he feels CS4 will help him “go confidently into uncharted territory” because even if he hasn’t done something the client is requesting, he knows he has the tools to figure out how to do it. (We feel like that here at RDesign a lot too.)

Someone from Odopod spoke about interactive digital design. His projects include MOSI Chicago, Playstation and Nike Skateboarding. He makes interactive prototypes in Fireworks. He can then save as a pdf with enabled commenting and disabled printing, to allow for ease of client interaction while not being worried that his prototypes (or comps) will get passed around too much. He showed a Scale and Transform of the path (ONLY the path) of an object being animated in Flash, Flash 3D effects, and said fewer programmers will now need to be involved with animation because it is easier for designers to use.

The best web / Dreamweaver upgrade I saw was the ability to click to see the CSS files being used on a portion of a site without opening the CSS file or switching to HTML view. You can also see code or CSS of items selected in preview mode.

The Curiosity Group came out to talk about graphics. Their projects include Disney, Microsoft, Dreamworks and the showcased Picklebird character for HP.

We oohed and aahed over tabbed Illustrator artboards, with multiple artboards working at once. The new blob brush creates filled paths quickly, similar to the Photoshop paintbrush tool. InDesign will show font, color and shape errors on the fly that deviate from your pre-set parameters. (Fewer surprises before going to print!) Then you can export to FLASH and change the Flash workspace set up to “designer” so it is set up more like the menus on Photoshop or Illustrator and more intuitive for a graphic artist to use. After exporting to Flash, you can edit text block while in Flash from the original InDesign file, and placeds pieces of art are auto saved as symbols.

The big WOW of Photoshop CS4 is “content aware scaling”. Let’s say you have an image of 2 cars parallel parked on the side of the road. There is enough space between to park a motorcycle, but you have an image of a VW bus to fit in the space. As you scale, or contract, the VW bus image horizontally to fit, the program intrapolates the important parts of the image and won’t scale those – so the bus is now 3 feet shorter but the headlights, wheels and doorhandle are the right size! As you’re dragging! It’s hard to explain but cool to watch. Let’s say you have an image only 4 inches wide of some people in a field, but it needs to fit across a magazine cover. As you drag horizontally to widen the image, the grass and sky fill the space, but the people don’t get wide and bloated. They stay the same width they were before you started scaling. You can watch a video of it on Adobe TV. You’ll be glad that you did.