Rufus Deuchler | Travelogue

This Asia trip that I am doing together with Greg and Jason is truly inspiring. Yesterday we did our Masters show in Taipei, flew to Hong Kong in the evening and performed again today.
It is truly amazing that hundreds, thousands, of people chose to take a day off work and come watch us for five hours as we go through a truly integrated workflow, using all of the applications in the Adobe Master Collection CS3. The live feedback we get from our audiences is what gives us the strength to move on. The attention, the heads nodding, the cheers and the laughter are our blessing. Thank you Taiwan and Hong Kong.

感谢台湾和香港

Next stops Singapore and Kuala Lumpur.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 12:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (5)

This is totally Adobecadabra material! Kush Amerasinghe has a new episode on Adobe TV that shows you how the virtual set in Caffè Fibonacci works [link to show]. Awesome stuff! I am glad that he chose to investigate that matter at "Ask the Adobe Ones". Thanks Kush, I love your show and that was pretty good Italian you spoke there ;-)

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 11:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Yes, one word. That is all that comes to my mind. Now, that was an incredible event. The entire team at the Adobe office in Korea managed to get about 3'000 creative professionals into one room to listen to what Greg, Jason and yours truly had to say, for an entire day.

The "Adobe Masters Class 2008" in Seoul was a huge success, and that's a euphemism. After a morning session, where we presented an integrated CS3 workflow to produce content for print, web, and video, we split into three separate sessions.
Mine was a three hour design track, during which I took my audience through Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop Extended, InDesign and Adobe Kuler. The korean audience, typically very quiet and reserved, was cheering and clapping at every feature, old and new, that was shown to them and explained in depth.

Later, when we gathered up in a general session where there was a lucky draw, we had dozens of fans asking for photographs and autographs. Well, that was certainly a first for me.

Greg, Jason, and I left Korea asking ourselves "was that for real?".

Thank you Korea! - 당신을 감사하십시오 한국

Now to Taipei, Hong Kong, Singapore, and Kuala Lumpur.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 02:18 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)

A new version of kuler desktop is now available and it allows users to import kuler themes directly into three CS3 applications: Adobe Illustrator, InDesign and Photoshop (instead of having to save a Swatch Exchange to the desktop first).

Just as a reminder, kuler is a web-hosted application for exploring, creating and sharing color harmonies. And, as I always say in my seminars, it's great source for downloading color themes. But what is even more interesting is that you can upload your own! And maybe, one day, your color scheme will be top of the list. Go create!

This version is also a great example of the integration that is possible between Adobe AIR and the Adobe Creative Suite, using SwitchBoard. For the more nerdy among us, SwitchBoard, which is available on Adobe Labs, allows AIR applications to communicate with CS applications via an ActionScript API (application program interface). Using the API you can send ExtendScript commands directly to the Creative Suite applications that support the ExtendScript Library. Cool stuff! The possibilities for developers are infinite.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 01:10 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

On Saturday, May 24, Leonardo Agosti held the first Reggio Emilia InDesign User Group Chapter Meeting, and it was a great success. Over thirty of our friends (the vast majority from inEditoria.net, my first attempt at creating a community around InDesign in Italy), and some unregistered participants showed up. It was great being able to put a face on names that I had read about in my InDesign forum for years. I got to show my presentation on the "making of InDesign" and do the technology preview of the feature that would allow InDesign CS-next users to export in a format (.xfl) which would in turn enable authoring in Flash Professional CS-next. Cool stuff!
Present were also Mauro Boscarol (italian color management guru), and Matteo Oriani, an Application Engineer at Adobe Italy. Discussions were interesting and vivacious.
One of the attendees told me that "it is such a relief to see that there are other martians out there that can spend a day talking about this kind of stuff". Exactly! This is what the InDesign User Groups, or user groups in general for that matter, are for: learn new stuff, share ideas, and meet "martians" just like you.
We then all went to eat "gnocco fritto", "tigelle", stuffed with salami, cheese, ham, and things I better not remember. Literally saw cholesterol levels go through the roof. But man, is that stuff good.
Cannot wait for the next Reggio Emilia InDesign User Group Chapter meeting.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 03:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)