As the tour finds its last step in summer turn Fine arts faculty was the great place to finish the artistic and powerful tour for adobe Tour held by RIA Edge User group and managed by its manager Ahmed Rabieh.
All the topic was tailored for young artists to help them and to push their work in future and to produce finest Egyptian designers ever.
It was a wonderful stop for Adobe tour in Egypt 2009 in Cairo university, computer science faculty, hosted by IS Society in Computer Science Faculty.
Topics Ranged between RIA world and Internet future, Artwork and design techniques and Adobe Flex demos and discussion. I had a wonderful speech about "Design Techniques" and how to tailor an artwork to dress code a nice suit.
Design session target was to teach the design techniques that graphics designer follow to build a full application and to use all client's material, available resources, implementation methods & rules and Process to follow.
These points was mainly discusses with attendees of students to transfer them the Graphics designer role in real life and in the modern work spaces, also to make them ready to their next life of working with teams. You can watch part of the keynotes here:
For Some Technical Issues and some copyrights and disclaimer policies I can't add a download link for the keynote slides, in the next few lines You can find the main keynote points we went through.
Goal:
Graphics is the suit that code wear.
Speaker:
Designers move from one level of knowledge , experience and applying process to another which moves his work from one level to another. This formed a lot of experience and knowledge I can share with others.
Materials:
This section handled the Main part of any artwork process is the input step, what can client offer, how Designer could create his materials, how to get material, how Designers could help their selves to deal with bad materials.
Resources:
As threads connects material to each other, resources could help Designers to tailor their artwork, Rescuers could be Online resources like photo stock sites, Online utilities and depositary, offline tools like Adobe tools for design, or could be real people and team members who can create parts of the suit the Designer works on.
Inspiration:
this section discussing what is inspiration, How to be inspired, Brainstorming and discussions.
Implementation:
This interesting part of keynote discuss the abilities could designer have or learn and how Designers could use all materials, resources and inspiration to tailor the finest artwork.
Process and delivery:
In this section I used to stress on process and how Designers could have different processes to reach the same goal, Also discussing how to monitor your self as a Designer, how could use others help to improve your process including the delivery and it's quality.
This was a summary about the keynote, you can follow my next articles for more details and also you can attend Adobe tour in Egypt events to enjoy the full day event and sharing the Edge of Internet and RIA application techniques.
Late in 2003 when I started to work for real business and using Photoshop professionally I used to add many layers as I need and I add many layers to fix the missing layers I created or to replace other without any kind of arrangment or to use any type or masking, naming, or linking techniques that Photoshop offered me that time. since this time like any other Photoshop user I had my own style of work and it developed by time not by others. Later I Joined a full time job as a designer then the Impact of misunderstanding other team members to my files developed my style a lot and changed my techniques to stay in the same tone for others. after all these years most of design teams faces this old habits of non-organized files and structure.
Photoshop is a better place.. Unnamed layers and layer order is the most comment problem according to statistics I made with sector of design team in my researches to enhance team work between all design and UI team as well.
Ease of use and the enhanced user interface in latest photoshop version encourged designers like me to go wild in there needs and imagine more features could help them to reduce time consumed to create an artwork and to ease team work and communication between all design/UI teams.
in these series we will go through these ideas from the community to make photoshop a better place for all designers.
Catch Me If You Can.. It's very common to use other team members .psd file trying to update a minor update with an estimate time about 5 minutes, searching for layer with normal techniques could cost you more than 1 hour, some designers are talented in creating a complex files with opacity and styles that makes you try to catch the run away layer. One of the most effective methods to find a layer is to right click on these layers and you can see the stack of layers appear there, but what if the file owner didn't created any names and used defaults like ' Layer 1 ' to 'Layer 100', Although photoshop could list only layers that comes in the mouse click spot it still need more enhancements like coloring each layer with it's group color and make the top layer's name in bold.
I use google.. I'm a fan of google search engine and how it's easy, reliable and quick, also this search engine implented in many applications now like e-mails and images, this type of technology makes users search for same behavoir and changes their idea about their applications. I asked my self many times why Photoshop don't have a search component or palette to enable users search by layer name, layer visibility, layer type etc.. and it could be a very easy way to find all the visible layers or the layer have "Header" in it's name by other team members, Imagine the time that could be saved by this way an one more interesting feature could be added is to re-arrange all layers according the search results to give a new look for the file and search results could be saved for later use for all the team members.
More Thumbnails.. layer thumbnail is a very useful and customization add more value for this feature. I need more thumbnails but in the most interesting component "Layer Comps" which is the least usage component with all it's importance in team working and creating multi view design or a click through scenario. in the current "Layer Comps" palette I can't see the view till I activate one of the states saved in the "Layer Comps" palette. it take a lot of time and confuse other team members as they can't expect how the look of the Photoshop document will change.
this vison could save a lot of time and effort for team and could make it easier to produce consistent look for team production.
