Day I

Monday I whent to Kortrijk to get my first demo of CS5 for designers. So Ton Frederiks from Adobe gave us a nice overview of the most important new features of Illustrator, Indesign, Flash Catalyst and Photoshop.

(photo by marc-thiele)

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Perspective grid

As usual in a new Adobe release a lot of small handy improvements were made but What really got my attention was the perspective grid that you can use in Illustrator. You can see a demo of this new feature here at Adobe TV.

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Content-Aware Fill

Also very impressive is the new Content-Aware Fill tool in Photoshop. In a previous post about the release of CS4 I wrote about an amazing new features called Content-Aware scaling or ’seam carving’. Content-Aware Fill is a quite similar tool because it allows you to remove an image element, and replaces the missing pixels almost magically. This new tool matches lighting, tone, and noise so it looks like the deleted content never existed. The technology is also added to the healing brush. Here is a demo of this new feature at Adobe TV.

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From Indesign to Flash Player

An other remarkable change was made in Indesign.  We all know Indesign as an application that provides precise control over typography and design to create page layouts for print. In Indesign CS5 it is possible  to build interactive documents for playback in the Flash Player using a series of new panels. Here is an introduction to how that should work. Personally I’m a bit sceptic about these additional features. Webdesigners today don’t work with Indesign, so if you ask a print designer to make an interactive document it will not result in amazing top of the bill interactive creations. Adobe probably felt the buzz about online magazines (especially with the coming of the iPad) but forgets that print designers mostly don’t have the education or experience in a digital environment. So in my opinion not the best choice if you want your online magazine to stand out and exploit the opportunities of a digital medium.

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Day II

Yesterday was day II of Multi Mania 2010, hopes were high but the expectations were met!  we started off with a quick overview of Adobe CS5 and a kick-ass talk by Aron Balkan. Here are some memorable quotes of the speakers I went to see. I can only encourage you to check out there blogs and websites because they are all very interesting personality’s.

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Aral Balkan – The art of emotional design

“Worry about the user’s needs not yours, dont drive people crazy!”

(photo by vormplus)

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Geert Coppens – Animated Explanations: Viral educational content

“It’s all about attention!’

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Brendan Ciecko – Sex, Drugs, and Rock & Roll: One Pixel at at time

“Today I’m 22 years old and I founded my company ‘Ten Minutes Media‘ in 2003″

As a true entrepreneur Brendan started designing and developing music websites when he was only 11 years old. In a few years Brendan made sites for a variety of artists in the music industry like Katy Perry, Mick Jagger, Snoop dog, New Kids On The Block, Splash, David Guetta, Lenny Kravitz and many more. His company Ten Minutes Media is a absolute success serving clients like Warner Brothers, Capitol, SonyBMG, Clear Channel, …

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Christophe Rooms – CS5 for developers

Here is a demo of some new features in Flash CS5. It explains the Flash Text Engine, new Text Layout Panels, iPhone App Development, streamlined workflow with FXG support and the ability to import between the Flash tools, Photoshop and Illustrator.

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Branden Hall - HYPE: Combining creativity & code

“Creativity is not a talent it’s a skill!” & “Don’t forget to play, Play is practice.”

Branden is an amazing developer who frequently works with designer-rockstar Joshua Davis and try’s to keep his vision and his work fresh by constantly experimenting with his code. A good example of this philosophy is the HYPE framework a collaborative visual framework developed in FDT and AS3. At Multi Mania he showed us some examples of what the HYPE framework can do. Read more at http://www.hypeframework.org/blog/

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ADNERDS – Kicking ass in advertising land

“Technologie means noting if it doesn’t run on brainjuice”

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Little Miss Robot – Show some f°cking empathy!

“Try to put yourself in the shoes of your customer’s, co-workers, suppliers and community”

After showing us some amazing work like the domotica interface for Nico and opera live: Rigoletto & Gaetano Donizetti, the boys of Little miss Robot and there cute mascot tried to learn us an important lesson. Try to put yourself in the shoes of the client and the people around you, so don’t try to make something that only you like.

And they did than in a quite unusual way. They tried to engage the audience into a roll play in witch a client ‘Wimpy the pooh’ (who tries to sell toilet paper to a younger target group) and 3 volunteers from the audience (the creative studio + one senior jury member of cannes) had to improvise to solve problems the sector runs in to every day. It proved to be a serious challenge to get the timid Belgian people to participate but I’m sure everybody in the session was obligated to consider his or her roll in this very important discussion that is going on in our sector.

Back in to time with this hand (free?) kit. A cool gadget From YUBZ you to call in Retro style. Choose from lots of different models and illustrations.

I totally dig this Looking glass tablet, an amazing web search concept (Winner of the Red dot design concept award 2009) by Mac Funamizu, web/graphic/industrial designer working in Tokyo, Japan. Of course he’s concept totally ignore all technical boundaries but I just love his contemporary design solution for today’s need to find information on the web. And have you noticed this is a great example of how we can optimally use augmented reality? Not just the little experiments with your webcam we all played with but actually a intelligent way of giving or reality an extra virtual reality layer with useful information. We already see company’s like Amazon pushing the eBook. And the Netbook just saved this year’s computer sales in a time of financial crisis. So there certainly is a right climate to support the R&D for this kind of products.

(image left: Looking glass concept  -  image right: German augmented reality advertisement for MINI)

So I’m pretty shore that the Apple tablet/ebook will look a lot like his looking glass, or at least I hope so! The Apple tablet has made serious Mac-buzz in the blogosphere for the last few months, so everybody is aguishly waiting for the official announcement of this new Mac product. I know I am, certainly if you see al the concept mok-ups that Mac freaks made while guessing about the design and functionality’s of the new Apple tablet. Here is a great post summering the 12 best apple tablet concepts circulating online today: http://www.toxel.com/…

More pictures of the Looking glass concept:

This is what users of Internet Explorer 6 see when they visit Momentile.

And here are the sketches John Martz made for this illustration.

(via John Martz)

A nice Infographic that tells the story of the internetbrowsers in a different way:

(via)

What is Wave? It is the new way to email. This application looks it’s going to be  your: msn, Facebook, address book and email account all in one program. You should really have a look at TechCrunch to find out the details about how this great mail combines many different functionality’s of the social networks and connects them in a very natural way. Of course ‘mail programme’ is not really a name the guys at Google want to hear. They did a amazing job designing and developing this application, I’m glad that finally somebody made a communication tool fitting this day and age, but I wouldn’t really go so far to call it futuristic. Founders of Wave are: Lars & Jens Rasmussen (Better known as the brothers that build Google Maps) and Stephanie Hannon.

Click here to view the embedded video.

More info

(via Computerlove)

http://nexus.ludios.net/

(Tanks to Imke Dielen for the tip)