Monthly Archives: March 2013

Jack Dorsey on what succeeded for Twitter

Okay, let me be honest: I generally hate the veneration of tech successes, particularly very newly minted ones (i.e. maybe you got lucky, and now I’m told to sit enraptured at your knee). Dang, though, if I didn’t find this talk from Twitter creator Jack Dorsey interesting. Key points:

1) Draw: get your idea out of your head and share it, 2) Luck: assess when the time (and the market) is right to execute your idea, 3) Iterate: take in the feedback, be a rigorous editor, and refine your idea.

“Get it out of your head” has sure been true in my experience. Sketch ideas out yourself, and if need be pay someone to design/animate them. Aids to audience imagination make all the difference between blank stares & “let’s do this.”

[Via]

Photography: Downtown Jerusalem, backwards

PetaPixel writes,

Messe Kopp sent us this awesome and mind-bending video he shot on the streets of Downtown Jerusalem. It it’s a backward-is-forward video that shows a man getting up from bed and taking a stroll down a city street, interacting with various people and objects along the way. The entire 2.5-minute video was shot in a single take.

 

Wondering how the original capture looked (i.e. running frontwards), some thoughtful soul downloaded, reversed, and uploaded the piece:

Ephemicropolis: A city of staples

British artist Peter Root is the god of office supplies, arranging 100,000 staples over 40 hours to create “Ephemicropolis.” He writes,

A shining monochrome mega-construction defies immediate identification of scale. Vulnerable, not to a rampaging Godzilla, but to the looming threats of a micro-apocalyptic light breeze or a ballistic projectile fired from the shoe of an unwitting passer-by.

[Via]

Creative Cloud members: Your beautiful portfolio hosting has arrived

Check out the first fruits of Adobe’s acquisition of social network Behance: You can now build a beautiful home for your photography, design work, and résumé—all for free (instead of the usual $100/yr.), and without writing any code, as a full Creative Cloud member.

Check out this quick demo of Behance ProSite, and take a look at some lovely example sites.

To get started:

  1. Log in and go to the Apps page on creative.adobe.com
  2. Find the ProSite icon under “Other Services” and click on the “Get Started” link
  3. You’ll be brought to the ProSite welcome page on Behance, where you can either log in or sign up for Behance to build your portfolio and launch your ProSite when you’re ready.

 

The Behance team hints at more good stuff to come:

We will start integrating some of Behance’s best community features into Adobe tools. Want feedback? Adding new work to your portfolio? We want to make this more efficient and more integrated into your everyday workflow. Stay tuned for updates in May!

We have grand plans for ProSite – and other “Pro” features – that will make Behance a more powerful utility for creative careers. We’ve got a long list of enhancements and features that will bring online portfolios to a whole new level.

Stay tuned, and meanwhile enjoy ProSite.

Gathering client feedback via Lightroom galleries

Having come from the world of Web design & gathering client feedback, one of my first efforts on Photoshop was to ship templates for the (now deceased) Web Photo Gallery that enabled viewers to comment on images. Now The Turning Gate offers a much more sophisticated tool for Lightroom:

The Client Response Gallery facilitates communication between the photographer and client following a shoot. The photographer publishes a web photo gallery of images from the shoot, and the client marks images as selects by ticking a checkbox for each image to be kept. Selected images are then submitted to the photographer’s email address as a comma-separated list, which may be copy-and-pasted into Lightroom’s filters to quickly isolate images in the catalog for processing.

Check out the site for many, many more details (e.g. how it works on mobile devices). The tool costs $25.

Join the Behance Portfolio Review Week, May 13-20

“If you don’t showcase your work because ‘it’s not good enough,’ don’t expect it to get any better.” Sounds about right to me. With that in mind, check out the Behance Portfolio Review Week, May 13-20:

Attend or organize an in-person Portfolio Review with the creative community.

Behance Portfolio Reviews bring members together at events in cities and towns around the world – organized by members, for members. Attend a Portfolio Review to present and get feedback on your work, hear from experienced professionals, and meet your local creative community.

Check out the site for full details (what goes on, how to find or start one, etc.). Last year nearly 4,000 people participated in 46 countries (80% of participants being outside the US). (Here’s an infographic.)

Sneak Peek: New rotoscoping power in After Effects

You know what sucks? Trying to win a tech fair shootout against the After Effects team. “Dammit,” I’d tell them, “whenever we put something in Photoshop, you strap wheels on it—not cool!”

But it is cool, of course, and this fun video shows a brief history & peek into the future of rotoscoping in After Effects:

Related from the archives: “Male-pattern baldness -> Great Photoshop feature

"The Touch": Gestural control for Lightroom

Timothy Armes has created an interesting looking new LR add-on:

The Touch is a new way for Mac users to work with Lightroom using either a trackpad or an iPad. At the heart of The Touch is its ability to allow you to develop your images without having look away from your work. A set of simple and intuitive gestures allow you to instantly grab the correct slider or puck and move it with precision without having to spend you time finding these elements on the user interface. Even if the slider in question isn’t visible on the interface The Touch will scroll straight to it.

It’s available to download/try, and it costs $20 to own.

[Via]

Who's got two thumbs & is disappearing from a video?

A. This guuuuuuy!

Fascinating:

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Informatics (MPII) have developed video inpainting software that can effectively delete people or objects from high-definition footage. The software analyzes each video frame and calculates what pixels should replace a moving area that has been marked for removal. 

More detail is on Gizmag. [Via Bruce Bullis]

Previously: Diminished Reality; Tourist-Zapping in Photoshop.

Half a million people now subscribing to Creative Cloud

In less than 12 months:

Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced that Adobe® Creative Cloud™ has exceeded 500,000 paid individual members. The company also reported that free and trial memberships have exceeded 2 million. Free subscriptions are a proven on-ramp for customers to move to a paid Creative Cloud membership.

I know this subject arouses a lot of strong feelings. I can’t always provide satisfying answers, but please know that people are listening. It’s totally valid to raise questions & concerns. I just want to note that a huge number of people have already migrated to Creative Cloud subscriptions and are, by all accounts, digging it (even if they’re not necessarily motivated to comment here).

"Instagram Is Too Hard"

Seriously? I must politely say that if you’re not willing to take a few seconds to think about improving your image & possibly giving it a caption, I likely don’t need to see it.

I don’t accept that simply maximizing active use, consumption, etc. is an unquestionable good. (That’s how cancers operate.)  You want quality, and if Instagram further reduced friction (e.g. by enabling batch upload from desktop apps), it would turn into an unwashed Facebook stream.

Instagram makes me a better photographer in that it induces me to slow down just a tiny bit & try to craft an image/caption pair that my audience will like (literally). It’s an incredibly simple form of gamification, and dang if it doesn’t work.

Welcome back, Bryan

I’m delighted that Bryan Lamkin, the PM of Photoshop back in its early days & later a key executive at Adobe, has returned to the company.
Brasky
In a wide-ranging blog post he offers his take on the merits of Creative Cloud:

As a former product manager, I remember the team’s frustration when they were forced to hold back features to fit our 18-month Creative Suite product cycle. It was very difficult to deliver new innovations “off-cycle” due to our delivery and accounting model. (Every desktop software company struggles with this same challenge.) Nothing is more satisfying to one of our talented engineers than getting a new product feature into the hands of customers quickly, and now we can.
Creative Cloud… will be the hub for creativity worldwide and enable you to work when and where you want. It will be where creative communities gather to be inspired by each other’s work and collaborate on projects.

Right on. Glad to have you back, Bryan.

Apply for Adobe's $1 million in youth scholarships

I’m pleased to see that Adobe is designating more than $1 million to the Adobe Foundation’s Creativity Scholarships for youth.

The Creativity Scholarships program was developed to support the next generation of creative thinkers and equip them with resources to apply creative confidence to advance their education in creative fields.

The scholarships provide financial support to high school seniors and students in their first year of post-secondary education who have participated in the Adobe Youth Voices (AYV) program and will be attending or continuing an accredited post-secondary degree or certificate program.

To apply, submit your application AdobeScholarship.com by March 31, 2013. Full details can be found here.

Adobe & Maxon announce an alliance

“Today,” writes After Effects PM Steve Forde, “Adobe announced it is entering into a strategic alliance with MAXON, the makers of CINEMA 4D.” He goes on to hint at future integration:

“Do what you know, and be the best at it.” Hand in hand with this idea means that you DON’T do a whole lot of stuff you don’t know. With this relationship announcement you have two companies who focus on being the very best at what they do…

I wish could go into more detail right now – but stay tuned. This area is about to get very exciting.

See also the Maxon announcement which says, “As part of the alliance, both companies are expected to collaborate and engineer a pipeline between Adobe® After Effects® software and CINEMA 4D to give users a seamless 2D/3D foundation.”

"You are selling people *themselves*"

Apropos of the “holes-not-drills” example (focusing on customer goals), I liked this bit of advice from CopyHackers.com. It meshes exactly with what I say about Instagram, Paper, and other apps making people look cool and even feel loved. And it reminds me of the coarse but candid promise I heard back when my team was building the Gucci.com Web site: “This shirt will get you laid.”

You are not selling a product

…You are selling every visitor to your site the chance to see a better reflection in the mirror.

Don’t believe me?

  • Apple isn’t selling me an iPod. They’re selling me a happier, cooler version of myself.
  • SalesForce isn’t selling me a CRM. They’re selling me a more organized, more professional version of myself. They’re selling me a future of profiting from well-managed relationships, which is what I want.
  • DonorsChoose isn’t “selling” me a way to support schools. They’re selling me a more giving, more community-minded version of myself. They’re selling me the chance to influence the next generation, which is what I want.

What aspiration does your product address?

What's the deal with Creative Cloud for Teams?

Glad you asked!

Join Creative Cloud Evangelist, Paul Trani and Director of Evangelism for Creative Cloud, Greg Wilson on Thursday, March 21, 2013 at 8AM Pacific for a Google Hangout to get the inside scoop on Creative Cloud for teams – our solution that makes working together — and managing licenses — easier than ever.

Be sure to submit your questions for the evangelists using #CreateNow.

For more information on Creative Cloud for teams, visit our official website.

Adobe paid internship for art, design, & photography majors

From Julieanne Kost’s blog:

Adobe is looking for art student interns with expertise in any of Adobe’s Creative Suite products. These interns will interact with our user communities by answering questions and providing learning content to our customers. They will use Adobe’s products to create video tutorials, artwork, animations, and samples. Ideal candidates will have strong writing and communication skills as well as experience with social media, forums, or blogging.

Apply for the Digital Media Intern position at Jobs at Adobe and search for job number 20458.

Happy St. Pat's!

The Royal Irish Academy has used Adobe DPS* to create “a gift from the people of Ireland to the people of the world for St. Patrick’s Day to mark Ireland’s Presidency of the Council of the European Union: ‘A History of Ireland in 100 Objects'” (available for iPad/iPhone, Kindle Fire, and Android tablets):

“Fintan O’Toole, a journalist from The Irish Times, launched the project in 2011 with a series of newspaper columns highlighting 100 objects from Ireland, the UK and Norway that connect with Ireland’s rich past,” writes Joe Zeff, whose design firm produced the app.  “Those columns became a hardcover book, and that book became the series of apps that we designed and developed for multiple platforms using Adobe Digital Publishing Suite.”

Elsewhere, the NY Times tells the story of the Jackie Clarke Collection, “an astounding treasure of more than 100,000 items that provide an intimate retelling of Ireland’s long struggle to free itself of English rule.” The collection was amassed by a fish merchant from County Mayo (home of my family). Check out the photos, audio & video.

* Did you know that if you subscribe to Creative Cloud, you can create an unlimited number of DPS titles for free? Just sayin’.

An interview with Photoshop prodigy Taylor McCormick

Check out the Photoshop.com blog:

In only two years, Taylor McCormick has transformed herself from a budding photographer into a one-of-a-kind artist.  Through an involved and self-driven process McCormick matured from a high-school student with a camera and an imagination into a gallery-sponsored artist, traveling to Atlanta, Washington D.C., New York and Los Angeles for her work. Her journey can be described by the same word used to describe most of her published images: dreamlike.

Taylor

6-second videos? Who's got that kind of time??

Vine, shmine. How about 1-second videos?

Cesar Kuriyama says, “Like many, I used to take too many photos and videos,” but since turned to capturing a series of 1-second daily impressions. “Now I record less and enjoy the moment more… I’m more mindful of doing something notable every day.”

Now he’s kickstarted an app to enable others to do the same:

The app, currently in development [update: Now available] with the Brooklyn-based studio Alchemy 50, essentially takes the organizational legwork out of the whole endeavor. It provides a calendar, which gets populated with thumbnails for clips as days pass. You can shoot video directly from the app, or snip shorter, second-long clips out of videos from your camera roll, with helpful nudge buttons for zeroing in on just the right bit. You can set the app to give you reminders to shoot video at certain times during the day, and, of course, you can export the full, second-by-second montage whenever you deem it ready.

Promising tools for client reviews

I still have scars from making HTML “presents pages” at the very last minute for client reviews. Now some new tools promise to make things much easier.

Web service Flatsies bills itself as “a tool for designers to share their concepts with clients in a simple and elegant way.”

Elsewhere, Filefolio promises to help you “Share images, fonts, color swatches, documents and login codes. All on one gorgeous looking page.” It hasn’t yet launched, but you can sign up to be notified.

[Via Khoi Vinh]

Participate in a new collaborative art project

More than 5,000 artists have already registered for the Adobe-Red Bull Collective Art project, and more than 60% of the time slots have already been reserved. As the site explains,

It is an evolution of the concept of “Cadavre Exquis” in which each collaborator adds to the Collective Art through being allowed to see the end of what the previous artist contributed. Participants are free to choose if they want to paint, draw or scribble their work or just to create it digitally with design software.

As the Adobe site says,

Sign up here to create an original piece of art to contribute as part of a global collective art installation. Then join Adobe® Creative Cloud™ to download Adobe creative tools you’ll need, such as Adobe Photoshop® and Illustrator®, to create your masterpiece.

Here’s footage of the event happening in Greece:

Think On My Sins

This blog used to be better. Instead of posting just a bunch of semi-random content finds, I used to talk more about ideas that matter. Since incurring the vocational brain damage that is fatherhood, however, I’ve struggled to find time to compose meatier thoughts. I want to try to change that.

Silicon Valley loves to talk about the importance of celebrating failure. It’s mostly crap (when’s the last time you saw the Pets.com CEO speak? or WebVan, or Excite@home, or…), but there can be real value in reviewing what’s worked & what hasn’t. I plan to share some constructive reflections over the next days & weeks. Stay tuned.

Turn Dropbox into a Web server with Site44

Here is an admirably simple (and free) way host static Web sites via simple Dropbox folders:

I found it incredibly simple to set up, though for my team there’s a significant limitation: we can’t share the Dropbox folder used to host the content. That’s not the end of the world, and it might actually be wise to have a single person be responsible for pushing all changes live. In any case it’s neat stuff. [Via Brian Nemhauser]

New research aids stop motion animation

Begone, hands! New technology out of Hong Kong promises to:

allow animators to perform and capture motions continuously instead of breaking them into small increments… More importantly, it permits direct hand manipulation without resorting to rigs, achieving more natural object control for beginners.

The first half of the demo is pretty dry, but jump ahead to about 2:20 to start seeing the big wow:

[Via David Simons]