The last couple days I have spent every spare moment playing around with Adobe Illustrator and InDesign. I have found a new motivation to learn these programs after visting the Adobe Live conference in North London on Wednesday. Adobe Live was showcasing the latest Adobe Creative Suite 3.
Adobe Live will feed your imagination. Whatever you’re into, this annual two-day feast will help you turn your creative vision into reality – on the page, on the screen, in print or on the web.
- Explore the latest integrated creative tools from Adobe: Creative Suite 3
- Get more of the tips and tricks you love
- Delve deeper with our new hands-on training sessions
- Be inspired by some of the industry’s best known experts
- Discover the wider world of creative solutions in our exclusive partner expo: it really is a one-stop chance to sample the world of complementary hardware, software and services.
Come for one day or two – it costs absolutely nothing to feed your imagination at Adobe Live. Give your creativity the nourishment it deserves.
Besides the awesome new features in Photoshop Extended CS3 that I just have to have, there was also some very neat new functionality in Illustrator that I learnt about.
The most significant additions to Illustrator are new color features. The new Color Guide can automatically create entire palettes of harmonious color schemes; you can choose complementary, analogous, monochromatic, or triad colors, all based on the currently selected color.
The other great thing about the new Creative Suite is how easy it is to import design files from one Adobe program to another, for example Illustrator files or Photoshop files into Flash, copying objects from the one program to the other. This is a huge time saver!
What was most interesting was when one of the Adobe speakers asked the audience, via a show of hands, who had a PC and who had a MAC. I was one of about 7 people with a PC vs. the gazillion MAC users. This definitely made it very clear to me that my next purchase has to be a MAC. I’m not going to lie though, it’s as much a designer status thing as a performance upgrade 🙂
This makes things quite difficult though. Now I have to double my budget, and wait a tad longer to purchase a MacBook Pro as well as Creative Suite 3, as the Creative Suite 3 license I buy for my PC would not work on my future MacBook …
Why can’t things just be easy.
2 responses
Yeah, CS3 rocks! I’m really loving it. I haven’t delved into InDesign though since I really don’t have a need for that (yet).
Yayness about the Mac. Sadly, my poor little PowerBook G4 has seen better days. I’d love to get a new Mac, but that won’t be happening for a very very long time. Pity they are always so expensive.
Mate, I’m on a Mac now and all I can say is “WOW!”. I am blown away by the performance and stability. Completely.