Specifically, the Saturday Night Live crew that makes Digital Shorts, and the folks behind Cartoon Network’s Annoying Orange.

• The SNL team has ridiculously tight deadlines, even re-cutting shorts between dress rehearsal & the live show. “We don’t ever have time to see a ‘spinning ball’ on the screen while we’re editing. It just can’t happen. Leveraging the tight integration between Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects and Photoshop makes the spinning ball go away.” Check out how they work.
• The Annoying Orange crew ditched Avid & chose an all-Adobe workflow, as you can hear them describe in the clip below. (Photoshop integration & no transcoding of RED footage were key.) “I’m happier than a talking piece of fruit with a weird mouth,” says Premiere PM Al Mooney. “And that is HAPPY, obviously.” Check it out:

“I promise not to turn the blog into JNack’s Kiddie Kavalcade,” I promised five years ago today as Margot & I welcomed young Finnegan Liggett Nack into the world. I think I’ve kept my word, though my Twitter account (which didn’t even exist back then*!) hasn’t fared quite so well.

My God, do I ever love these little guys (Finn & his sequel Henry, codenamed “El Segundo” in utero & thus dubbed Goonie by his bro). A few sleep- and oxygen-deprived thoughts (as we’re celebrating Finn’s Fifth at 10,000ft):

• I’ve heard it said “It’s not amazing that adults make children, so much as that children make adults.”
• A friend remarked that when it comes to raising kids, “The days are long but the years are short.” Yes, days can be so long indeed—and yet, dang, five years??
• Work-wise, I’ve sometimes likened having kids to having suffered some kind of traumatic brain injury. I used to work all. the. time. Now I’d guess we spend ~40 hours per week kid-wrangling. “Work smarter, not harder,” blah blah. Whatever: there’s no potion to just restore that time & energy. Things do seem to be getting better, little by little. It’s a game of inches, man…
• “Making the decision to have a child is momentous. It is to decide forever to have your heart go walking around outside your body.” Bingo. (And no, Steve Jobs didn’t coin the phrase.)

And lastly I’m reminded of some Paul Simon:

Well, that was your mother
And that was your father
Before you was born dude
When life was great
You are the burden of my generation
I sure do love you
Let’s get that straight

Well said, Paul. And happy birthday, my magnificent little Finnster. Thanks for everything 🙂

*to say nothing of theirs

Aaaand, once again I wish I were going to South by Southwest. If you’re luckier than I, check out Adobe Creative Camp Sunday, March 10th. Sessions include:

• Introduction to Adobe Edge Tools and Services
• Concept to reality: Creating Adobe Edge Reflow
• What’s new in Adobe Creative Cloud?
• Responsive Design, from every angle
• The content-shaped elephant in the room

As I customer I always found it so much more interesting to hear from fellow designers than from toolmakers. On Friday at noon Pacific, Aaron Macdonald, the principal of A3 Creative Solutions, will talk about how his shop used Adobe Muse to broaden their skills:

A year ago A3 was specializing in print and brand design and turning web design work over to other agencies. When he became a Creative Cloud member, Aaron began experimenting with Adobe Muse to leverage his print design skills to design his first website. Aaron will discuss how this has changed his business, discussing his evolution from a traditional print designer into cross-media design agency utilizing Creative Cloud, Adobe Muse and Business Catalyst to design for the web and provide an enhanced service to his customers.

You can register here.

“The Adobe Creative Cloud, Zombies and Beer – It doesn’t get better than that,” says Russell Brown. He points out that his ADIM13 show (April 7-10 in Boulder, CO), features some great speakers, including

• Julieanne Kost
• Chris Converse
• Mordy Golding
• Sandee Cohen
• Katrin Eismann
• James White

According to the show site,

You’ll begin with still images to create monster-themed beer packaging, then you’ll create an online beer advertisement utilizing advanced Photoshop video features. In the process you’ll master many of the wonders of Adobe Creative Cloud… You’ll follow your very own monster-themed project from inception to completion, including: printing, laser engraving a glass bottle, and hand assembly. Your finished packaging will be displayed in class for all to see.

Did you ever wonder? Well, me neither, but it still makes for a kinda entertaining little film:

[Via]

I’m going to try holding myself to this:

My mother made me a scientist without ever intending to. Every other Jewish mother in Brooklyn would ask her child after school, “So? Did you learn anything today?” But not my mother. “Izzy,” she would say, “did you ask a good question today?”

That difference – asking good questions – made me become a scientist.

— Isidor Isaac Rabi, Nobel laureate

[Via]

Heh—cute.

[Via Andrew Kavanagh]

“It is a curious thing that the more the world shrinks because of electronic communications, the more limitless becomes the province of the storytelling entertainer.” — Walt Disney

[Via Ron Green]

This joins PXLPFCT, TYPENRD, & LIGHTRM on my growing list of faves. [Update: Other winners include 24P (After Effects), RTFM (support), and ADOBE PS.]

[Photo courtesy of Dan McSweeny]

“WOW!!!” writes Russell Brown. “This is a fantastic set of Photoshop CS6 tips and techniques for FREE! Really fantastic stuff.” 

In the free 77-page CS6 Superguide eZine, “The new features of most of the CS6 Products are covered in depth, with articles from industry leaders such as Jack Davis, Colin Smith, David Blatner, Janine Warner, Stephen Burns, Chana Messer, Weston Maggio and more.”

Friday at noon Pacific:

If you’re currently using Photoshop or Lightroom and want to go the next step to create video, join this session to learn the basics of video capture, editing and delivery with Adobe Creative Cloud. Adobe Evangelist Jason Levine will show how creative pros can get started with Adobe Prelude, Premiere Pro, and Adobe Media Encoder, all included in Creative Cloud membership. You’ll be amazed at what you can create with a little coaching!

…check out this post from XKCD.

I’ve compared working on mature apps to so many things—changing the wings of a plane while it’s in flight, building Johnny Cash’s Frankenstein car, and more. People always say, “Stop adding anything new… except this handful of things for me, personally.” And they always push us to “simplify” and “just reduce” the apps, yet they flip out if you take away their cherished anachronism. I always think of the Onion article, “98 Percent Of U.S. Commuters Favor Public Transportation For Others.”
Ah well—still good fun. [Via Foster Brereton]

• The Create Now World Tour is underway, likely coming to a city near you (check the site for details). If you’re a Creative Cloud subscriber, there’s likely so much more you could be taking advantage of; if you’re not, come see what you’re missing.
• Russell Brown’s ADIM conference is set to take place in Boulder, CO, April 7-10. I’ve always had a blast at ADIM. “You’ll begin with still images to create monster-themed beer packaging, then you’ll create an online beer advertisement utilizing advanced Photoshop video features. In the process you’ll master many of the wonders of Adobe Creative Cloud… You’ll follow your very own monster-themed project from inception to completion, including: printing, laser engraving a glass bottle, and hand assembly. Your finished packaging will be displayed in class for all to see.”
• Adobe MAX goes down May 4-8 in Los Angeles & features more than 300 sessions and labs taught by industry leaders and Adobe experts, covering everything from Web & design to digital publishing, gaming, and video. Note that attending also gets you full year membership to the Creative Cloud, so admission is actually a lot cheaper than it seems. (Oh, and if you attend the Create Now tour, they knock another $200 off MAX attendance.)

I don’t share this because it’s beautiful. It is, but I share it because of the obsessive insanity that Polish duo Kijek/Adamski must have put into creating the animation.

The Fox Is Black writes,

Made with approximately 2000 silhouettes extracted from PVC plates using a computer-controlled cutter, the video is a rush of color and a parade of movement. For Kijek/Adamski, the video is “an everlasting chain of convulsive memories”.

Okay, enterprising coders, here’s your free million-dollar (or at least multi-dozen-dollar) idea o’ the day: I need a way for my wife to assign me a task/reminder & geofence it.

For example, yesterday she sent me to the kids’ preschool with a tuition check in hand—which I promptly forgot to deposit. I wished she could have sent me a reminder that was associated with the school’s location. 30 seconds after arriving I could have gotten a notification. Then this morning she forgot her phone & asked me to bring it to work. I wanted to turn her text message into a reminder pegged to my current location: if I try to leave here, ask me about that phone.

I did a little poking & I see that the iOS Reminders app lets me geofence items (i.e. remind me either when I arrive somewhere or when I leave), but I can do this only if I have my phone handy. Via iCloud.com you can add people to reminders—but then you can’t (as far as I can see) make those location-specific.

So, who’s gonna code up not “Find My Friends,” but “Remind My Friends”? (This seems like a great addition to the fun couples’ app Avocado.) C’mon, it’ll be fun to get Sherlocked at WWDC, won’t it? ;->

“I asked a six year old what my movie should be about,” says Bianca Giaever, “and this is what he told me.” Just watch: 

(Now I really want to step up my bedtime storytelling game.) [Via]

Photoshop 3D features, CSS transitions, InDesign alternate layouts, and much more are featured in this month’s Inspire Magazine, both online and in the App Store.

Cool:

Brand Satisfaction compiled millions of responses from Facebook Fans of over 15,000 Facebook pages to determine the Top 20 brands with the most loyal Fans.

Photoshop is #10 out of 15,000+. Take that, In-N-Out Burger—and Starbucks Frappuccino, watch your back! 😉 Thanks to Photoshop’s awesome fans!

[Via Tom Hogarty]

You can get the whole shebang—Master Collection, publishing, storage, and more—for $19.95 per month. Get in on it here.

My little sons drew enormous enjoyment from this piece:

Adam Pertofsky, award-winning editor and partner at Rock Paper Scissors, recently cut the “Got Milk” Super Bowl spot for the advertising agency Deutsch NY with Adobe Premiere Pro.

1
[Via]

From the team:

Photoshop’s 23rd birthday is coming up and we want YOU to be a part of the celebration!

We’re asking our fans to create a birthday cake design using Photoshop! We’ll choose one submission to be created into a REAL cake to be delivered to Adobe HQ on our birthday, Feb. 19!

We’ll also share your artwork in a photo album right here on our Facebook page. Submit your photo here before Feb. 8.

(Sorry for the late notice; I just found out about the event.)

The San Jose Photoshop User Group is hosting Harold Davis tonight at 7 PM in the Park conference room at Adobe HQ. Pizza will be served at 6:30 PM.

Harold Davis is an award-winning professional photographer and the author of many bestselling books on photography and image processing including Creating HDR Photos: The Complete Guide to High Dynamic Range Photography (Amphoto), Photographing Flowers: Exploring Macro Worlds with Harold Davis (Focal Press) andCreative Black & White: Digital Photography Tips & Techniques (Wiley Publishing). His images are widely published, collected and commissioned, and his popular photo workshops are often sold out. Harold is a Moab Paper Printmaking Master. Learn more about Harold and his photography at www.photoblog2.com. Harold lives in Berkeley, California, with his wife, Phyllis, and their four children.

Final Cut vets talk about overcoming their disbelief about Premiere Pro—and the limitations of FCP—in these interviews from the show.

I love that Lego has started featuring their product designers in these short pieces. Here Gitte Thorsen (and you just knew Legos were designed by someone named “Gitte Thorsen,” right?) shows how she sketches out Hobbit characters, then sculpts them at large scale:

At some point I lost track of (and most interest in) all the hand-wringing articles about Photoshop & body image. Even so, I found this talk by model Cameron Russell interesting. She’s unusually sharp (her mom founded ZipCar, it turns out) and compares images of her with the real person.

Her points about models’ insecurities remind me of life in Silicon Valley: the more fortunate one is, the more one feels compelled to do & achieve even more (and the worse for not doing it). When I’m touring a potential kindergarten I think, “What kickass disruptive badassery am I missing out on?” I never think “I was 26 and living in Palo Alto and working on Photoshop”; it’s all “Facebook was taking shape down the street; what kind of loser misses out on that?” Talk about kindergarten… [Via]

“If you don’t watch this music video,” writes io9, “you’re robbing yourself of an opportunity to see a particularly fantastic video of a guy in an awesome robot suit blasting real-life videogame enemies (along with a few innocent bystanders). Just sayin’.” Indeed.
Fungus Time!!

To celebrate the Met’s exhibit Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop, the Photoshop team has created a contest:

We’d like to invite the Photoshop community to share their photo manipulations with us for a chance to win some special prizes. Every week, from now through February 7th, we will post an image from the Faking It exhibit that will serve as inspiration for that week’s submissions. Photoshop fans can submit their own altered photograph showing their interpretation of the theme, and at the end of each week, a random winner will be chosen to receive a print copy of the 296-page exhibition companion Faking It: Manipulated Photography Before Photoshop by Mia Fineman.

In addition to the weekly winners, participants who submit a video screencast of their entry, showing how their image was created, will be eligible to win the grand prize; a trip for two to see the Faking It exhibit in person at either the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. or the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas.

Mission accomplished, Invisible Creature: now I totally want to be your client, if it would get me a bitchin’ bespoke Lego creation.

We love our clients. We love Lego. So why not combine the two? For our annual Client Holiday gift this year, we decided to design a custom Eye Creature Lego kit. Edition of 6 sets. 444 pieces. 4 instruction booklets. 8 different mouth combinations – and a hinged top that allows the owner to store all kinds of fun items (as shown below). We even found 2 extremely cute kids from 1972 in my house that wanted to participate in the box design. Disclaimer: This product is NOT affiliated with Lego, folks – this was a gift. Oh, enough already. Check out how we made it below:

The fun little storage compartment reminds me of the Lego “peanut” car I fashioned while courting Margot. It continues to hold some quietly disintegrating Peanut M&M’s. [Via]

Spoiler: Opt-/Alt-click the layer mask! Yeah, I knew that; sure I did…

Meet Tim Riot & Matthew Bice, the Experience Designers on point for PS. They talk about the gig itself, some goals & challenges for CS6, and what they hope the future holds.

If that sounds like work you’d like to do, remember that the team is looking to hire a Senior Experience Designer.

Here’s an explanation from the corporate blog:

Effective December 13, Adobe disabled the activation server for CS2 products and Acrobat 7 because of a technical glitch. These products were released over 7 years ago and do not run on many modern operating systems. But to ensure that any customers activating those old versions can continue to use their software, we issued a serial number directly to those customers.  While this might be interpreted as Adobe giving away software for free, we did it to help our customers.

The crew at Brainstorm Digital is killin’ it once again:

Previously: The effects in season 1 of the show. [Via George Penston]

When devising what became Smart Objects in Photoshop, we had several goals:

• Enable non-destructive transformation & filtering
• Tighten integration with Illustrator & other apps
• Facilitate “edit one, update many” parent-child links among layers (a la “symbols” in Illustrator, Flash, etc.).

The last of these is far & away the most obscure and, frankly, confusing. Photoshop doesn’t present any indication about which layers are linked to which others, and it doesn’t offer a Library panel for managing SO’s. (There’s so, so much potential yet to be unlocked here.)
In any case, Julieanne Kost uses a real-world example to demonstrate how to link Smart Objects together (simply duplicate them on the Layers panel) and how to duplicate & unlink them.

When I first glimpsed an animated GIF on a Web site (Apple.com circa 1996), I felt like Galileo: “It moves!” Now I’m the cranky old man who says, “In my day, I could compose a whole trip to England [for British Airways] in 9.9kb! I was an LZW poet, I tell you!” And so, of course, Moving The Still is right up my posterized alley.

I don’t know whether looping ads for The Clapper, deodorant, and more produces that “in sound,” but it’s certainly way out. You’re… welcome?

[Via]

Merry Christmas, everyone. Wherever you are, and whatever holidays you may celebrate this time of year, I wish you great peace and happiness.

I’m not quite sure when I’ll get back to regular posting. I’m visiting my folks in snowy northern Illinois, aka “The Land That Connectivity Forgot.” (Margot says AT&T’s EDGE network represents “The Edge of Civilization.”) As soon as I can push enough content through a cocktail straw, I’ll get back in business.

Thanks for reading & for making it possible for me to do this job.

All the best to you and yours, now and in 2013,
J. (+M & the Micronaxx)

I’m thrilled that Adobe & Behance announced today that Behance (a million-member creative community, in case you’ve been living under a rock) is becoming part of Adobe.

Adobe thrives only when our customers do, and it’s not enough just to build—or to use—great tools. Making a living as a designer involves much more than making designs: it of course demands making connections, finding jobs, promoting your work, and getting paid. There’s a big world before “File->Open” and a big one after “File->Export.” Adobe’s bet is that if we can help you more effectively engage with your clients & your peers, your business will improve—and thus so will ours.

As with every acquisition/merger, people will say “I love [Behance]. Please don’t ruin it.” That’s totally understandable, but I wouldn’t worry. Behance co-founder Scott Belsky writes,

Adobe deeply respects the sanctity of the Behance community, and will preserve the philosophy and values that drive it. Adobe’s acquisition of Typekit is a recent example; the service has remained intact while also being incorporated into Adobe’s Creative Cloud offering for better accessibility and value for users.

Adobe’s tech will make Behance better. Scott says,

We’ve got a long-term vision for serving the creative community that is greatly advanced by Adobe’s reach, and what we have planned will also improve Adobe’s services in the process… There are so many things we’ve always dreamed of doing but lacked the resources, data scientists, and PhD’s to figure it out.

Creative Cloud has just started rolling, and it’ll only get more valuable. (Just last week, we added new digital publishing services and training features, and launched file sync and sharing.) Now, Adobe VP David Wadhwani writes,

All Creative Cloud members will soon gain access to the base Behance capabilities (like portfolio creation and community features) while paid Creative Cloud members will also have access to premium capabilities (like Behance ProSite).

I’m just incredibly excited about this, and when you see what we already have cooking, I think you will be, too. Stay tuned!

Check out this rather brilliant (pun intended) Kickstarter project:

BLAZE is a front light with super-bright LEDs, but it also projects the symbol of a bike down onto the road ahead of the cyclist. It’s adjustable, but ideally about 5m in front. It alerts road users ahead of the cyclist of their presence, helping to prevent them turning across their path (especially the big ones like buses and trucks!).  Making the cyclist more visible and increasing their footprint on the road.

[Via]

Ah, handy. I do the bulk of my local adjustments in Lightroom (where they’re inherently non-destructive), but sometimes I need a little more granular control.

Starts at 10am Pacific time: The event was recorded & is available for viewing below:

Sneak peek at Photoshop features to be unveiled:

At Create Now Live, you’ll:

• Be one of the first to hear what’s next in Adobe® Creative Cloud™.
• See what’s next in Adobe Photoshop®.
• Explore ways to take your design skills from print to online and mobile.
• Learn how teams can work better together with Creative Cloud.
• Learn from creative innovators.
• Iconic design agency Karlssonwilker talks about taking their unique design sensibility to the web.
• Go behind the scenes of “A Liars Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman” with Animation Director Justin Weyers.
• Scott Kelby shows off hidden gems in Photoshop CS6.

I’ve been enjoying David Friedman’s series of short interviews with inventors (e.g. this one with video game pioneer Ralph Baer). Now he’s creating a new PBS “Inventors” series, kicking off with the screw-in coffin*:

And I’m pleased to say that he’s now switched from Final Cut Pro X to Premiere Pro. This bittersweet piece on Batter Blasters is the first result:

*”What’s that, Death? Screw me? No, *screw you*!! (No, wait, you were right the first time.)” I will be here all week.

“Yo dawg, I heard you like using design tools to make design tools, so…”

Ever wish you could make Photoshop work exactly the way you want? Ever wish Adobe designers would walk a mile in your shoes? Ever wanted to stand up & champion the needs of the millions of creative people whose livelihoods depend on these tools?

I know I did; that’s exactly why I came to work here. And now there are two openings for designers to shape Photoshop & the next generation of imaging tools.

These are not easy gigs, but you’d be bored if they were, right? You have to want to learn (and learn, and learn) what a crazy-diverse range of customers needs, then combine your transformative vision with fortitude & exacting attention to detail. You don’t change an industry standard overnight, but keep sweating the details & you’ll be amazed at what’s possible.

Now then, the listings (the first applies specifically to Photoshop; the second to “bold new iOS multi-device applications”):

• Senior User Experience Designer, Photoshop (18722): Adobe’s Photoshop team is looking for a motivated, creative, senior-level User Experience Designer who shares our passion for design and the urge to make better creative tools for real people. In this role you will be tasked with generating the design of new product features, interactions, and visuals, for Adobe Photoshop.

• Senior User Experience Designer (18723): Adobe’s Experience Design team is looking for a motivated, creative, senior-level User Experience Designer who shares our passion for design and the urge to make forward-looking creative tools for real people. In this role you will be tasked with driving the design of new products as well as new features, interactions, and visuals for bold new iOS multi-device applications.

Click through on either for more details. The team looks forward to meeting you soon.

We’ve just launched the Adobe Translation Center. As the team explains,

The translation community represents the voice of the customer. This program enables the user community to provide quick, direct feedback about our products and content.

We created this program to achieve two key objectives:

1. Enable user feedback to improve the quality of translations of “Adobe languages” (those already supported).
2. Help users contribute to new “community languages”. Those are languages that individual Adobe products don’t currently support and where community contributions may give us an indication which languages Adobe should consider for product inclusion.

You can connect with the team via Twitter and Facebook, and on the globalization team blog.

“I’m a successful social media consultant, even though I’ve never had a thought or original idea in my life. But, because my firm charges lots of money, we’ve put social media on some of the tongues of some of the biggest companies in the world.”
Enjoy.

[Via]

Sting (yes, that Sting) says, “When Tim Jahnigen came to me with his idea for a football or ‘soccer’ ball that could be played on any surface and would never need a pump and never go flat, I immediately thought of all the millions of children and young people who could use the ball in refugee camps, conflict zones, and poor communities all over the world.” What a cool problem to attack with design.

[Via]

The event we initially announced for Dec. 5 has been pushed back one week. As a reminder,at Create Now Live, you’ll:

• Be one of the first to hear what’s next in Adobe® Creative Cloud™.
• See what’s next in Adobe Photoshop®.
• Explore ways to take your design skills from print to online and mobile.
• Learn how teams can work better together with Creative Cloud.
• Learn from creative innovators.
• Iconic design agency Karlssonwilker talks about taking their unique design sensibility to the web.
• Go behind the scenes of “A Liars Autobiography: The Untrue Story of Monty Python’s Graham Chapman” with Animation Director Justin Weyers.
• Scott Kelby shows off hidden gems in Photoshop CS6.

Today Adobe’s previewing the Creative Cloud Connection (download it here), a utility that syncs files on your computer with those in the Adobe Creative Cloud. (Remember, you get 20GB of storage when you subscribe to Creative Cloud, and you get 2GB for free just for signing up.)

So, who cares? Don’t you already get something similar with Dropbox, Google Drive, etc.? Yes and no. It’s true that the basic concept is familiar, but Adobe will roll out some really unique capabilities over time. (Trust me, I’m working on some.) For now we’re starting with the basics. VP Jeff Veen writes,

Any file you place into the Creative Cloud folder on your desktop will be available at creative.adobe.com, where it’s easy to browse, get links to share publicly, and leave comments. In fact, if the files were created by one of the Creative Suite apps, you can do even more: manipulate layers on a Photoshop document, page through an InDesign file, or generate a PDF of your work to share with others.

We’ve got lots to come, as well. Up next, we’ll add even more collaboration features, including the ability to share privately with workgroups as well as browse and restore previous versions of files.