Why we will adopt Adobe Creative Cloud

As part of its Creative Suite 6 announcement, Adobe also confirmed pricing for its new Creative Cloud service, which allows you to use all Creative Suite applications, plus some other features, for a monthly fee - initially, $29.99 for the first 12 months, then $49.99 thereafter.

Within our digital agency, all of our employees mainly use five different adobe products - Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, After Effects and Premiere. The most affordable way to acquire these licenses for these five programs is by purchasing the Creative Suite Master Collection.

As of today, the Creative Suite Master Collection upgrade from CS5 to CS6 cost $1,399 and can be purchased from Amazon for as low as $1,145.  Since Adobe typically upgrades its Creative Suite every 18 months, the Creative Cloud Service will cost us $900 per user for 18 months, or as much as the Educational version of the Master Collection would cost us, if we would qualify (which we don't).  So to us, it is a no-brainer that we will sign up for the Creative Cloud service.

Make Your Presentations Unforgettable

In the hit film Memento, the protagonist uses an intricate series of tattoos to keep track of his progress in hunting down the criminals who attacked him, robbing him of his short-term memory. You might not be fighting crime, but by understanding how short-term memory functions, you can create killer Microsoft PowerPoint presentations that will stick with viewers.

Forget me not
Short-term memory — also called working memory — actively holds information in our minds so that we can perform verbal and nonverbal tasks such as reasoning and comprehension. Our working memory also makes this information available for further processing.

In general, this short-term working memory has a limited capacity. By breaking information into chunks, we can improve the chances that our message will be remembered. Keep it simple:

• seven digits
• six letters
• five words
• three phrases

Less is more
What does this mean for your presentation? Format your slides with small chunks in mind, and viewers are much more likely to retain the information you present. For best understanding and retention, Digital Dazzle suggests that you limit each PowerPoint slide to these maximums:

• Five bullets of one word each
• Three bullets, each consisting of one phrase or sentence that does not exceed one line

Need to put more bullets on a slide? Use animation to build the list. Just be sure to reveal no more than these recommended maximums at each step.

Presenting: PowerPoint Done Right

A great presentation can do many things: Reinforce your brand. Enhance credibility. Motivate your audience to action. Improve audience understanding.

Unfortunately, great presentations tend to be few and far between. Presenters often try to explain concepts by using Microsoft PowerPoint slides packed with words and bulleted lists. What these presentations miss is the opportunity to do what PowerPoint does best: show your audience your message.

From awful to amazing
Fortunately, Digital Dazzle can rescue your presentations from PowerPoint purgatory. The key is to remember that your audience isn’t interested in your PowerPoint prowess. They’re interested in your message.

Digital Dazzle creates optimized screen mockups that clearly illustrate the concepts you want to communicate.

For example, the screen shot below shows how our partner, Lithium, intends to combine an externally-facing community conversation (shown in the right column of the screen) within Brainpark, an internal collaboration tool (shown in the left column of the screen). This integration will allow employees of their joint customers to internally discuss support issues while seeing in context what users are saying publicly.

Note that the functionality shown does not yet exist. But instead of trying to explain how the integration would work, Lithium used our mockup to show to their customers how the integration would work.

You can expend a lot of effort and thousands of words trying to explain an emerging concept — and still fail to communicate your idea to your audience. Instead, Digital Dazzle creates a visual example of the concept as if it already exists, so that your audience can see how the result will actually appear.

Digital Dazzle typically creates between four and six mockups that clients can then use to visually demonstrate complex concepts or proposed solutions that don’t yet exist. We can also create infographics and animations to help you tell your story.

By letting your audience see your ideas as they will look when complete, you can create a shorter, more focused presentation and make an immediate impact on your listeners.

Contact us for a no-cost consultation and learn how to give your presentations real power.

Keep trying new software - the only way to find the gems

Do you try new software? Often, occasionally or never?

We try new software all the time, since we keep looking for great tools to improve what we are doing or to add them to our arsenal.

But often, it takes more than one glance to figure out the power of a software app.  Or even one glance.

Case in point: Flexibits' Fantastical.

Our initial take was predictable: Yet-another taskbar app that allows a user to schedule calendar appointments.  We already have two free ones, we don't use them, so why even bother evaluating a new app, especially if it is not free?

So we did not bother.  Until I ran into Michael Simmons, one of Fantastical's creators, at Macworld.

He gave me a demo. I threw my objections at him, one at a time, and he showed me how to address them. 15 minutes later, I was sold - at home at night, I downloaded the app, tried it for 15 more minutes and then bought a license. And the next day I went back to Macworld to thank Michael for selling me on it.

So what's so special about Fantastical? It's the only taskbar calendaring app I've used that allows me to do everything without taking my hands off the keyboard. Hit a hotkey to bring it up and start typing your appointment in natural language. It knows how to interpret location and date information, plus recurring appointments.  There's even a shortcut for assigning the appointment to a specific calendar.  I'm done in seconds and can move on to my next task.

And that productivity boost is worth the cost of Fantastical, and then some. Thanks, Michael, for convincing me to give it a try!

Keynote a good tool for animation prototyping

Apple's Keynote has long been known as an excellent presentation tool on the Mac. But did you know that it can be used for much more?

The ESPI At Work blog outlined how they use Keynote as a rapid prototyping tool to quickly develop and test designs of new websites and apps. They are not alone. We also use Keynote extensively to develop storyboards and even concept video animations for client approval before polishing these concepts into final motion animations.

Of course, we could (and also do) use Powerpoint for storyboarding, but not for creating concept video animations.  The main reason for choosing Keynote is its advanced animation set, which allow not only for more different types of animations, but also for alpha-key'ed video exports, which you cannot do in Powerpoint.

You don't have to always use high-end or professional tools to develop assets and concepts, although we typically revert to these during the later stages of the development process.  But during the initial, creative phase, when speed is more important than refinement, we use prosumer or consumer applications rather than professional tools to get the job done quickly.

If you have a Mac and don't use Keynote, maybe you should check it out to see how it can allow you to quickly prototype animations and designs?  It is available from the Mac App Store.

iMovie on the iPad - good for casual videos only

Now that the New iPad has been out for a bit more than a week, how good is iMovie on the iPad with regards to producing videos?  Can it replace iMovie on the Mac?

The folks at ArsTechnica posted a review of iMovie on the new iPad. Their answer is similar to what we saw - while it supports 1080p, it's a good enough video editor for casual video to be posted to Facebook or YouTube, but not good enough for any serious work.  Apart from the fact that it is tricky to import and edit footage not shot on the iPad, the editing tools are still a bit limited, lacking features such as basic color and contrast controls, plus more advanced titling.

For now, while it's great fun to crank out some home videos quickly, we will not iMovie on the iPad for anything else.

Adobe Lightroom for Videographers

If you are a photographer, you know about Adobe Photoshop Lightroom.  You might even use it on a daily basis - it's one of the best tools out there for managing lots of photos.

As a Videographer, though, you might not have cared about Lightroom too much.  But you should. With the newly released version 4 of Lightroom, Adobe not only cut the price by 50%, but it significantly beefed up support for video.

Most importantly, you can quickly apply changes to the look of your videos - change the white balance, adjust exposure, contrast, blacks and whites and make your videos more vibrant.  While you might already have other tools to do any of these adjustments, if you asset-manage your videos via Lightroom, as we do, why not also use its capabilities to make derivatives with specific adjustments?

Overall, we already upgraded and integrated Lightroom into our video production process.