New Screen Developer Workflows
This week I’ve been attending the Adobe MAX conference. This is the second one I’ve been to and I’ve really enjoyed myself. I’ve always lamented with my classmates, colleagues, and professors that when it comes to teaching and learning, the tools will change and evolve, but the theories behind learning with the assistance of technology will be relatively stable. Having said that, I really like how Adobe has handled and carried themselves as they’ve had the responsibility of ensuring the opportunity for usesrs of the web to have good experiences. Good technology companies find ways to define and proliferate their mission and even though Adobe has a notorious reputation for creating really bloated software, for the most part they’ve handled their recent success since the acquiring of Macromedia who in my opinion had the previous responsibility for success in evolving user experience on the web.Someday, it may be someone else. But in the meantime, Adobe really has a handle on getting creative people to help engage people into using the Internet web browser as a medium for communicating lots of things. My subject of course is helping people who use the web how to learn most effectively.
Recently they’ve introduced a project workflow as a result of a subsequent product initiative previously code-named Thermo into what is now known as Flash Catalyst. What this does is incorporate designers at more levels to have a hand in how users of the web interact with screen design. I’ll elucidate:
Print design for the most part has a number of tools used to get educational materials in the hands of potential educators and learners. Adobe’s Illustrator and InDesign products in no doubt are the birthing area of lots of textbooks and promotional materials that typically are for PRINT.
Print design has several caveats that don’t necessarily translate into screen design. A lot of it has to do with layout and selection of fonts.
Adobe’s Flash Catalyst product allows for someone to take a design from someone skiled in print work and then hand it off to a web developer for production and deployment on the web using Flash as the medium. I’m looking forward to the types of designs that will result from this. Having said that, I wish to bring to mind that just taking an existing print design and pushing it onto the web has its issues, but with innovation comes revolutionary re-education initiatives. Print designers now can be trained in methods proven to work for SCREENS that typically you wouldn’t have had before.
It will be interesting to see how this affects the work/projects I do for my institution and for other potential clients.
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