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*** DesignGeek ***
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Tips and techniques for the digital designer
In this issue:
-- Free Software at Adobe Labs
-- Super Bowl Ads
-- How to Crop a Raster in Illustrator
Issue 60, 2/7/07
Written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion
... for her clients, colleagues, random contacts and interested subscribers
(c) 2007 Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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Free Software at Adobe Labs
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If you're deeply into the field of digital design for print, web, mobile devices, or anything in-between, you should be visiting the Adobe Labs site regularly:
Adobe Labs
http://labs.adobe.com/
What's the Adobe Labs page about? Why, click the About page, dear: "Adobe Labs provides you with the opportunity to experience and evaluate new and emerging innovations, technologies, and products from Adobe."
In "what's-in-it-for-me-ese," this means: Free software downloads (public betas -- stable enough to release, but still too many rough edges to charge for), experiments with web-based applications that might not ever be released, and interaction with Adobe engineers working on cutting-edge stuff via a community Wiki and forums.
Let's look at some of the software you can start using today ...
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Photoshop
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If you have a licensed version of Photoshop CS2, no need to wait for Adobe's next version of the Creative Suite (due out in Spring 2007), you can download and install late-stage betas of both Photoshop CS3 and Bridge CS3 for Mac/Windows right now from the Adobe Labs site:
Photoshop/Bridge CS3 Betas
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/photoshopcs3/
They download as a "set," you can't get one without the other -- but after you download and install them, you can use one and ignore the other if you want. The Mac versions are universal binaries (meaning they run in Intel-based Macs much faster than CS2 can) and the Windows versions run in Windows XP and Vista.
A flattened TIFF saved in Photoshop CS3 is a TIFF that can be opened anywhere, so you should be able to use the beta for actual projects, as long as you save out copies of your files in generic formats.
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Flash
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If you're a Flash geek, you may be interested in upcoming Flash Pro 9's ActionScript 3.0 and the accompanying ActionScript Virtual Machine ("the most significant advances in the history of Flash"); you can get these from Adobe Labs too. As with Photoshop, you'll need to have a licensed copy of Flash Pro 8 to run them.
ActionScript 3.0 Preview
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flash9as3preview/
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Lightroom
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The beta for Photoshop Lightroom, "the professional photographer's essential toolbox," has been available for a while now, but I never downloaded it. I was at a photo shoot in January and got to see first-hand how a photographer uses Lightroom in the real world. It was amazing! They're taking pre-orders for the shipping product now, but the Mac/Windows beta (beta 4.1) is still available for downloading:
Photoshop Lightroom
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom/
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Soundbooth
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Now in its second beta release, Adobe Soundbooth is an audio editing program, like how Photoshop is an image editing program. In these days of everyone and their mother making podcasts and videocasts, Soundbooth is not just for broadcasters. Get a taste of how a professional sound-editing application can clean up and enhance your digital recordings by giving Soundbooth a spin ...
Adobe Soundbooth
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/soundbooth/
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Kuler
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Here's a completely new software program from Adobe that's free and in its final release. It's a web-based application so there's nothing to download.
Kuler lets you quickly experiment and create "color themes" -- color palettes -- and save them online or download them as swatches to use in your CS2 (and CS3) applications. You can view the most popular color themes that others have created and download theirs, too. Check it out, the Kuler web site is beautiful to look at it and fun to play with.
Kuler
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/kuler/
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JamJar, Spry framework for Ajax, Digital Editions, etc.
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There are over a dozen "technologies" that the Adobe Labs site is sharing with designers and developers; the few I've detailed in this article are just the ones that are most accessible by regular designers. But, if you're a developer, or you're a workaday mope interested in seeing what's about to come down the pike, spend some time with JamJar and the rest. Your head will spin but you'll be better prepared to keep up the next evolution in our field and position yourself to take advantage of it.
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Super Bowl Ads
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I'm not a sports fan ... It took the fact that my hometown Bears were in the Super Bowl this past weekend for me to look up which network was broadcasting the game and remember to turn it on. Even then, I just had the game on in the background while I was puttering around the house doing other things.
The main thing I was interested in -- other than if we won or not -- were the commercials. When I heard the roar of the crowd die off I'd glance at the television to catch the score and see if a run of commercials was about to start.
It's an occupational hazard. Graphic designers share essential DNA with the creatives who come up with broadcast commercials, indeed, there are tons of DesignGeek subscribers with ad agency domain names. The tasks are a lot alike: How best to get the client's message across given the limitations of time, censors, and medium? Who is the audience and what story will reach them during their limited attention span?
Watching the commercials in the Super Bowl was like flipping through a Communications Arts special issue: The best of the best (for these well-heeled clients trying to reach this particular demographic) were on display.
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Missed the Game? Where to See The Commercials
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You can hunt through YouTube.com or similar sites to find them, but CBS Sports did a great job in pulling together one web page where you can see them all. They even mentioned the URL during the game! That was kind.
2007 Super Bowl Commercials
http://cbs.sportsline.com/nfl/postseason/superads
The page is neatly designed and the commercials are cleverly segregated by which quarter of the game they appeared in. On the right side is a grid of commercial stills and their sponsor name/title from the first quarter of the game. Click the buttons above them to view a different grid of stills from the second, third or fourth quarter commercials; or you can view them by advertiser name from a drop-down list. Click any still to load and play the commercial on the left side of the web page.
Tip: If you're on a Mac and having trouble loading the videos, try using Firefox with the free RealMedia Player 10 plug-in (you should see a link to it) -- this worked for me -- or sweet-talk a Windows user into letting you get some web surfing time on their computer.
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My Must-See's
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One of the commercials that I caught "live" during the game was so fascinating that I immediately rewound it (love that Tivo!) and played it again in slo-mo and in freeze frame so I could study everything that was happening on the screen.
According to the CBS Sports page, this Coca-Cola commercial was called "Happiness Factory." It's an animated (well, more like a motiontronic phantasmagoria meld of Drs. Seuss, Goldberg and Burton) look at what happens inside a vending machine from the time someone drops in the money until the Coke bottle appears in the bin.
A short period of Internet digging revealed that the animation was created by Wieden & Kennedy (the agency) and Psyop (www.psyop.tv), a multimedia and animation studio based in NYC. Kudos to all, it was phenomenal. Must have more!
The other Coca-Cola commercials were just as compelling: Side of Life (old man does all the wild things he's always wanted to do); Timeline (Black History Month tribute); and Video Game (Grand Theft Auto parody where the main character does good deeds).
These were great examples of commercials that mainly promote the "brand personality." My top choice for the commercials that hammered home a unique feature of the product were the two that Toyota did for their Tundra half-ton pickup: See Saw and Ramp.
In See Saw, the pickup pulls a 10,000 lb. load up a steepish-looking ramp (starting from a dead stop at the base) and on the downslope of the see saw, with the load breathing down its neck, skids to a stop before hitting dirt. And "Ramp" was even more nail-biting.
I had flashbacks to that nightmarish event involving me, an exit ramp, 40,000 pounds of cilantro and a cabover Peterbilt many moons ago ... gory details here: http://senecadesign.com/geekness/bio.html. If I'm ever looking for a half-ton pickup truck, you can bet that Toyota will be the first dealership I visit!
By the way, Toyota's site has a brief "making of" video for See Saw here:
http://www.toyota.com/vehicles/minisite/commercial/tundra_tv.html
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Katie's Commercial for The Rest of Us
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I didn't think much of the other car commercials, but the goofy car wash one for Chevy was kind of fun. It showed men dancing bare-chested and bare-pantsed, jockeying for the chance to wash a car stopped at an intersection. Text that read "Chevy HHR: Guys can't keep their hands off it" helped explain things a bit.
On Monday, I read in the Chicago Tribune that the spot was designed by 19-year-old Katie Crabb, a freshman at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee (since transferred to Stevens Point campus). She was the winner of Chevrolet's national competition for college students to design a 30-second spot promoting Chevy's cross-over cars.
Katie told the Trib that "her ad takes a different approach" to car commercials because it features semi-naked men dancing and stripping around a car instead of women. Katie, that's cool, but whose idea was it to include the really old dude? Yikes!
The Trib says that part of Katie's prize for winning the contest is a summer internship at Campbell-Ewald, an ad agency that's part of the group that handles Chevy's advertising. Congrats, Katie! And welcome to our world.
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How to Crop a Raster in Illustrator
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A lot of Illustrator users like to incorporate raster (paint/pixel-based) images into their illustrations via the File > Place command. After an image is placed into the Illustrator file, though, it's seemingly impossible to crop out the parts you don't want shown, especially if the user is more familiar with page layout programs like QuarkXPress or InDesign. Dragging on an image frame's "handle" as you would in a page layout program just scales the image.
The problem is that Quark and InDesign always use boxes (aka frames) to contain imported images; and these frames act as cropping controls for the images they contain. Make the frame small, only a portion of the image is revealed. You can move the image around within the frame to reveal different parts of it.
Illustrator doesn't use frames, it just places the raw image. The frame and handles you see when you select an image is the bounding box of the image itself. It's exactly the same as the "subframe" that appears in InDesign when you select an image with the Direct Selection tool. (And dragging a handle on that frame also scales the image in InDesign.)
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Illy Cropping 101
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If you want to crop an image in Illustrator, you have to make your own cropping frame first. Illustrator calls these "clipping masks." Create your frame with any tool that can make a closed path: the basic Rectangle Tool, for example, or a letter converted to an outline, or a custom path you draw with the Pen tool.
Then drag the path on top of the image, positioning it and sizing as you like. (You can adjust this later, too.) Select both the image and the path with the Selection tool and choose Object > Clipping Mask > Make, or press Command/Ctrl-7. Voila, you have an image cropped inside a frame. You can move and scale just the image or just the frame with the Direct Selection tool.
If you change your mind later and don't want to crop the image, click on it with the Selection tool and choose Object > Clipping Mask > Release, or press Command-Option-7 (Ctrl-Alt-7 on Windows). Then select the frame you created and delete it.
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Illy Cropping 201
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Just as in a page layout program, cropping an image with a clipping mask doesn't delete anything, it just hides the portion of the image outside of the cropping frame.
If you've embedded the raster image into your Illustrator file, though (by turning off the Link checkbox in the Place dialog box, or choosing Embed from the Links palette menu), all that hidden data is adding to your file size. Lots of Illustrator users opt to embed placed images instead of linking to their originals because Illustrator lacks a "Collect for Output" feature. They prefer that all elements of an illustration required for final high-res output be contained the same file, especially if it's to be placed into a page layout file.
Assuming you're in the "embed" camp, and you're certain of your crop, and the extra unnecessary file size is bugging you, you can get Illustrator to actually delete the hidden image info, reducing your file size dramatically. Since there's no going back after you've closed the file, though, it's probably something best saved for a final step.
Select the cropped image with the Selection tool and choose Object > Flatten Transparency. (If Flatten Transparency is greyed out, which seldom is the case, give the object a 99% opacity in the Transparency palette first.) In the Flatten Transparency dialog box that opens, slide the Raster/Vector Balance widget all the way to the left -- the Raster side -- and enter the image resolution you want (usually, 300 ppi).
Click OK and viola, the image is permanently cropped. The clipping mask is gone since it's no longer necessary. And the file size is undoubtedly much smaller than before.
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DesignGeek is a free bimonthly publication written by Anne-Marie "HerGeekness" Concepcion, a cross-media designer and authorized Adobe and Quark training provider. She owns Seneca Design & Training, Inc. in Chicago, Illinois (http://www.senecadesign.com/).
To subscribe to DesignGeek or read archived issues, go to its home on Seneca's site:
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Contact Seneca by phone at 312-946-1100 or e-mail at info@senecadesign.com
Copyright 2007 by Seneca Design & Training, Inc.
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