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 (6)

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)

Four countries, 7 cities, 9 days; Helsinki, Oslo, Malmö, Götheborg, Stockholm, Copenhagen, and Aarhus. I had the great opportunity to talk to about three thousand of our friends. What I showed in the three hour presentation included the Appearance Panel, working with Symbols, and Live Color in Adobe Illustrator CS3. I then went to show just how cool the kuler color community is; and remember to post your own colors (who knows, maybe yours will be "most popular"). After that we got an in depth look at how Object Styles can make your work more efficient in Adobe InDesign CS3.
That is also when I showed the fastest way to get a Photoshop file into an InDesign document. Thank you all for not answering that the fastest way would be a "copy and paste", which would obviously be wrong.
Here's a little reminder:

Yes, just drag and drop the icon onto your InDesign page. This is the fastest way!

Continue reading "Nordics tour. Wow, and thank you!" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 06:02 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today Paolo Santoro, Matteo Oriani, and yours truly are in Florence, my home town (so to say). How could I miss that?
Attending were about 150 friends from Tuscany, and beyond. Again, in the four hours of the presentation we went through a complete workflow that included InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop Extended, Dreamweaver, and Acrobat. The thing that marvels me each time we do that, is how much users still do not know, and how much I can learn from their questions. Truly inspiring.
The tour now goes to Mestre and Rome. I will be in the Nordics, so Michela di Stefano, and Alberto Comper will be replacing me.

Grazie a tutti quelli che hanno partecipato! E' sempre bello poter insegnare e imparare qualche cosa.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 02:53 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Day two of the tour. Today we are in Arese, a city North of Milan.
What I forgot to mention yesterday, was that this entire tour has been organized in schools. This is actually a pretty cool idea because it has virtually no cost, and is a win/win situation. The school gets advertised for free to a broad range of professionals from the field. I mean, how many times, as a Designer, have I been asked "what school would you recommend for a good graphic design preparation?". Now I have a few more answers. And we get access to large auditoriums for our presentations.
Today, in Arese, the school has asked to do the presentation to their students in the morning (the same we will be doing to professionals and companies in the afternoon). Like I said, win/win.

Continue reading "CS3 A tutto ritmo - Day 2" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 10:47 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)

Today, yours truly is in Turin speaking at an event organized by Adobe Italia. This is the first stop of a tour that will take us through six different Italian cities. Just under 200 friends from all over the are where pushing on the doors forty-five minutes before start.
I am here with my colleagues Paolo Santoro and Matteo Oriani. Each one of us has a different role in the workflow. Paolo is the InDesign layout artist, Matteo is the Illustrator guy, and yours truly is the Photoshop geek. Together we show the audience a workflow that will take them through most of the new features in Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium (yes, the one with Dreamweaver, Flash and Photoshop Extended).
Thank you Turin! Next stop Arese (Milan)
____________
Oggi, mi trovo a Torino ad un evento organizzato da Adobe Italia. Si tratta della prima tappa di un tour che ci porterà in sei diverse città italiane. Quasi 200 amici della zona di Torino si trovavano dietro le porte già 45 minuti prima dell'inizio dell'evento.

Continue reading "CS3 A tutto ritmo - Kicks off!" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 02:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Greg and yours truly will be touring Scandinavia in May to show you how to best use Adobe Creative Suite CS3 Design Premium in your creative workflows and production. We will be focusing on InDesign as a hub for putting together your assets, but we'll also touch Photoshop Extended, and Illustrator. During the three hours of our presentation, we’ll be looking at the possibilities these applications can offer and demonstrate their tight integration. We'll be going over each application and also explore some workflow integration with Adobe InCopy. With Greg, we'll also show how to best prepare your documents for XHTML export, and then rapidly edit the CSS in Dreamweaver to publish content on the web.

Continue reading "Touring Scandinavia like Vikings on their longships" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 02:57 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

For the end of April, beginning of May, Adobe Italy has organized a tour to show what it truly means to work within the Adobe Creative Workflow. We'll be touching Turin*, Arese*, Verona, Florence*, Venice, and Rome (I will personally present at the shows marked with *).
And, since these events will be in italian I will continue the description in the language of Dante.

Adobe Italia sta organizzando un tour per mostrarvi che cosa significa lavorare nel flusso di lavoro Adobe. Il tour passa da Torino (22/4)*, Arese (23/4)*, Verona (29/4), Firenze (6/5)*, Venezia (10/5), e Roma (14/5). Sarò personalmente presente nelle città indicate da un asterisco.

Continue reading "CS3 Tour in Italy. Mamma mia!" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 06:42 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Today I am in sunny Estoril, a small town just North of Lisbon (Portugal). Why am I here? Well, for the International Map Trade Association (IMTA) Annual Conference & Trade Show, of course.
The International Map Trade Association is the foremost worldwide organization of the mapping, geospatial and geographic information industry.
I presented three sessions on Adobe Creative Suite 3 Design Premium, of which two were geared towards migrating from QuarkXPress to InDesign, and from Freehand to Illustrator. All sessions included information specific for cartographers, who, by the way, are users that tend to push Illustrator to the max.

Continue reading "Creative Suite for Cartographers at IMTA" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 07:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Today in Vienna, there were just under 200 of our Austrian friends.
Now is also the time to look back upon the Adobe Masters Tour, and realize that more than 1500 users throughout Germany and Austria have seen us demonstrate cross-media / cross-applications workflows. The impression I got from meeting the audience is that this way of working, of thinking, or approaching projects really fascinates everyone.
The event was a full six hours, and I mean, this is almost like watching Sergei Bondarchuk's "War and Peace" (1968); but as during the other stops nearly everyone put up with us until the very end
As with everything, in the end is the reward; apart for having had the opportunity to go through all the applications with us, attendees were in for a lucky draw to win a Master Collection. So Jason picked a sheet out of the box... and the winner is Helmut W.! Unfortunately, Helmut was one of the few that left the room before the end. So Jason had to pick another lucky winner.
Thank you Austria.
Greg is off to Ireland, Jason to the Netherlands, and yours truly is flying to Portugal tomorrow morning.

Continue reading "Adobe Masters Tour: Vienna" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 03:08 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)

Hamburg is sadly our last stop in Germany. As in the other cities, the audience (approximately 250) was glued to their seats for the whole six hours of our cross-media / cross-applications demo. This time the venue was too small to accommodate everyone and seating was organized outside the movie theatre.

Thank you Hamburg!
Greg Rewis, Jason Levine, and myself will take an early flight to Vienna tomorrow for the last show of the tour.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 04:34 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

The theme of this year's TOCA ME Design Conference was "beyond surface". Who's the person behind the idea? What's the story behind the artwork?
The event had two parts, a conference, and an exhibition where selected works and projects from local and international artists were shown. And a lounge of course, with designer furniture, music drinks, and food.

Continue reading "After the TOCA ME Design Conference" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 01:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Third stop of the tour. 18 hours of presentations behind us; but the day was, again, action packed.
In Cologne we had an audience of approximately 480 participants; all glued to their seats for the six hour of our cross-media/cross-applications presentation.
This time, Greg even managed to throw in a good presentation of the Spry framework for Ajax. The Spry framework for Ajax is a JavaScript library that gives you designers easy-to-use yet powerful Ajax functionality to your Dreamweaver documents, and which allow you to build pages that provide a richer experience for your users. It is designed to take the complexity out of Ajax and allow designers to easily create Web 2.0 pages. And believe me, I am a print designer, I have used Spry in some websites I designed without a problem. It has changed the way I think about designing web pages; give it a try!
So, if you have not yet done so, proceed to download the Spry Updater for Dreamweaver CS3 now. The downloads also contain the JavaScript library, documentation about the framework, and sample files that show how you could use it.
Tomorrow is a traveling day. Back to Munich for TOCA ME Design Conference on Saturday.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 01:32 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)

Greg, Jason (depicted here while talking about the puppet tool in After Effects), and myself left Munich right after the show to catch the next flight to Frankfurt, where we arrived late in the evening.
At 12pm we started our second Maters Tour Show with an audience of approximately 250.
One of the attendees came to me and told me that the show was "spannend". That was probably one of the nicest compliment we could get. Spannend means "suspense-packed". And, yes, a cross-media workflows are enthralling. Something that only a few years ago was unthinkable, due to compartmentalized workflows and responsibilities, is now effectively a reality. I am personally thrilled to see that the audience recognizes the benefits of thinking outside of the box and embracing this new way of thinking about assets, design, and publishing in general.
This is the Adobe workflow we are showing. We just wish we had more time to show even more; although in the last two days we did over 12 hours of presentations.
Next stop Cologne; we hear rumors of a very large crowd... stay tuned.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 02:06 PM | Permalink | Comments (4)

This first stop was impressive; just under 400 users came to watch Greg, Jason, and myself.

What we do, during this tour is a simulation of a creative workflow. We are the agency: Greg (Web), Jason (Video), and me in the Design department. We literally use the entire Creative Suite CS3 - Master Collection, including Bridge, Illustrator, OnLocation, Photoshop Extended, Fireworks, After Effects, InDesign, Dreamweaver, Premiere, Flash, and Acrobat, to create, manage, and publish our assets. Cross-application and Cross-media. The whole enchilada!
Next stop Frankfurt.

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 01:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

Wohoo! Germany sure is hot turf this month. Right in the middle of the tour with Greg and Jason, I will split for a couple of days to attend and speak at the action packed TOCA ME Design Conference on February 23 in Munich, and then home for a day (my son's 5th birthday party, cannot be missed).
Anyhow, TOCA ME is an event which gathers top designers from all over the world. Following this year's catch-phrase is "Beyond the Surface", designers will present their projects created in various creative areas such as print, web, product design, all the way to video and interactive installations.

Continue reading "TOCA ME Design Conference 08" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 03:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

From February 19 to 27, Greg Rewis, Jason Levine, and Yours Truly will be traveling across Germany and Austria on a tour to demonstrate a true cross-media workflow. We will be using most of the applications included in Adobe Creative Suite 3 Master Collection and we will create, manage, and prepare various assets for publication on media which include print, web, video, and mobile devices.

Continue reading "Adobe Masters Tour - Germany and Austria" »

Posted by Rufus Deuchler at 03:07 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)