Get To Business.

I will start by introducing myself - I’m Tal Zubalsky, Octabox’s Lead Designer. This is my first blog entry here, so nice to meet you!
A couple of weeks ago I upgraded to Adobe CS3, and I’ve primarily worked with the new Flash and Photoshop releases since then.

As far as the work on the Octabox layout is concerned (which takes place mostly in Photoshop, a bit Illustrator too here and there) the new features don’t change or improve my workflow, basically because I just don’t use any of them for that kind of work.

On another project I’m working on, on the other hand, the new features in Flash and Photoshop, and the correlation between them really make a hell of a difference.
As a designer with a basic knowledge of actionscript (Flash’s Java-like scripting language) the road from designing a layout in Photoshop to having a fully functional interactive page in Flash, with animated transitions and buttons, is shorter than ever.

Some of the highlight features, for me at least :

- Importing a PSD directly to a Flash document. Flash keeps the layers, the vector paths and even the text layers. The downside here is that although Flash itself has bitmap styles (like glow, drop shadow, bevel, etc.) on the PSD conversion it rasterizes the layer styles to a flat image. Nevertheless – it saves a whole lot of time! (It was kind of foreseeable though, since adobe bought macromedia, and I don’t think it was a big surprise to anyone).

- The new way of controlling bitmap effects in Flash with actionscript – now you can, for example, easily set a button to glow, or cast a shadow with an onMouseOver event, without needing animation, additional layers or anything else. This feature really makes the scene cleaner, and the SWF sizes smaller.

- The quick selection tool in Photoshop – this one is really cute. Though it doesn’t mask complex things very accurately, it does save a lot of time getting the basic mask and picking it up from there.

- The smart filters in Photoshop – also, a very nice addition, and well… it just makes sense. Why should effects like Gaussian blur be destructive?! In after-effects it’s not! 

Well, that’s it for my first impression of some of the new adobe CS3 products.
See you later!

Tal.