As was announced alongside CS6, Adobe will also be launching the Creative Cloud on Friday. The new option allows users to download and install all the programs that are in the Master Collection. Users can then store and share their content across desktops, mobile devices and the cloud. It’s the version of CS6 that’s targeted towards those who want to publish content to the Web. It’s available at a subscription pricing of $49.99 a month.

“We announced Creative Cloud and CS6 two weeks ago and these releases have caught the imagination of creatives everywhere,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “Today we’re shipping CS6 and look forward to the beginning of an exciting new era as we introduce Creative Cloud later this week.”

According to Adobe, those who buy CS6 can look forward to these new features:

New levels of performance with tools that take advantage of Adobe Mercury Graphics functionality, allowing users to go from ideas to finished work faster than ever before.

Enhanced user interfaces that vastly simplify workflows, so users can focus on their content and achieve results quicker.

New capabilities that streamline the creation of responsive content, ensuring website and apps look great across virtually all screen sizes and form factors.

Remarkable new science, integrated into imaging and video apps, makes previously impossible tasks suddenly possible.

The four versions of Adobe CS6 are now available at Adobe Authorized Resellers, the Adobe Store in North America and Adobe Direct Sales. The prices are as follows: $2,599 for CS6 Master Collection, $1,899 for CS6 Production Premium, $1,899 for CS6 Design and Web Premium, and $1,299 for CS6 Design Standard. For more information on the individual versions and the software contained therein, check out the official product page.

If you have been a CS user since at least CS3, Adobe is also offering a special discounted price on a full Creative Cloud membership. Normally $49.99 a month, a one year contract for existing customers will only be $29.99 a month for the first year.

Adobe seems to be offering a little something for everyone with the newest release. I’m tempted to sign up for the Creative Cloud if only to have access to After Effects and Premiere Pro at a price that’s way cheaper than what the Master Collection costs.

Comments

Adobe CS6 is going to be comprise of 14 CS6 applications and four Creative Suites. These includes Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium, Design Standard, Production Premium and the Master Collection. The company is also launching the Adobe Creative Cloud with the release of CS6 which allows users to download and use all of the tools that come with CS6 for a monthly fee.

“Creatives get a ton of innovation across CS6, with milestone releases of all our flagship products,” said David Wadhwani, senior vice president, Digital Media Business, Adobe. “With CS6 and Creative Cloud, we’re also introducing new products, new mobile workflows and advanced publishing capabilities that show we are laser-focused on ensuring design, Web and video pros have everything they need for the delivery of high-impact content and apps.”

The flagship product of CS6 is obviously Photoshop. The key changes that are coming with CS6 is the Adobe Mercury Graphics engine that allows users to see instant results from common tools they use including Liquify, Puppet Warp, Transform and Lighting Effects. Photoshop also has new and improved content-aware features.

Illustrator is getting a revamped interface and a new image tracing engine. It is powered by the Mercury Performance System for increased speed on 64-bit systems for Windows and Mac.

InDesign promises to streamline the creation of multiple layouts from a single set of content. It’s powered by the new Adaptive Design Tools which include Alternate Layout, Liquid Layout, Content Collector Tools and Linked Content.

Adobe has also revealed a new application called Adobe Muse. It promises to allow creators to make HTML5-powered Web sites without having to write any code.

Speaking of HTML5, Adobe is fully embracing the Web technology to its fullest. Some of this is seen in creators being able to integrate HTML5 animations made with Adobe Edge into Dreamweaver projects. Dreamweaver is also being integrated with PhoneGap which allows developers to create native mobile applications across multiple platforms.

In a surprising move that shows Adobe isn’t all about pushing their own platform, they have included an easy tool in their Flash Professional Toolkit that allows developers to convert Flash applications to HTML5 via CreateJS.

Adobe Premiere CS6 is another tool that many creators are no doubt excited about. The excitement is warranted since Adobe is adding dozens of new features including the new Adobe Mercury Playback Engine which now supports OpenCL on MacBook Pros.

The company thinks that creators are really going to like what they’ve done with After Effects calling it the most significant release in a decade. This is partially due to the new Global Performance Cache which saves previews instantly which cuts down the time you have to spend going between projects.

Production Premium is also getting some new features from Adobe Prelude, which “streamlines logging and ingest workflows in post-production,” and SpeedGrade, which “contains powerful finishing tools for film finishing and color grading.”

Adobe Audition is adding new features to help with audio post-production. These features include real-time clip stretching, which allows users to stretch clips to fit an edit, and Automatic Speech Alignment, a tool that enables automated dialogue analysis.

Adobe is also announcing a third-party API called Adobe Mercury Transmit that allows “broadcast video monitoring to connect directly into the Mercury Playback Engine via third-party cards from AJA, Blackmagic Design and Matrox.

Of course, the most important thing when it comes to new Adobe products is the price. These tools are usually pretty expensive and that is still the case here. Adobe CS6 Design and Web Premium will cost $1,899 with Adobe CS6 Design Standard costing $1,299. As for the other releases, Adobe CS6 Production Premium will cost $1,899 and Adobe CS6 Master Collection will go for $2,599. As always, previous customers can upgrade for a smaller fee.

As mentioned above, Adobe is also introducing Adobe Creative Cloud with this release which allows users to have access to all of the above tools at a monthly rate. If you sign up for an annual membership, the use of CS6 will only run you $49.99 a month. If you just go by a month-to-month membership, the cost will be $74.99 a month.

The retail and Creative Cloud release of CS6 is expected to happen with the next 30 days. If you so wish, you can preorder the software now. If you want to see all the new features for yourself, Adobe will be hosting a CS6 launch event livestream at 10 a.m. PDT (1 p.m. EST) on their Web site.

Comments

The update to, well, updating is called Visual Studio Update and is now available to users of the Visual Studio 11 beta. It notifies a user through the same notification method in which Windows Update uses. For those lucky enough to not be familiar with Windows Update, VSUpdate will bring up a little dialog box on the bottom right hand corner of the screen telling you that updates are available.

The actual process of updating is pretty simple though. You just click on the notification and it will bring up the Extension Manager. From there, head to updates, and then to the product updates section. There will be an update button here to click that will install the selected updates to Visual Studio 11. If the update notification becomes like Windows Update and pops up every ten seconds, you can control that too. Head to Tools and click Updates under Extension Manager. From here, select “Disable automatic detection of available updates.”

And wouldn’t you know it, the VS team is already using this new update method to roll out some fixes for the Visual Studio 11 beta. The fixes include performance improvements for large C# projects and addressing the “most frequently reported crashing issues.”

The most interesting part about the update process is how the team is going to keep it to the simple two-step process listed above. To keep it simple, they have to include all the VSUpdate packages that came before the current package. This means that they can’t release updates as soon as they’re ready or else it would get too big.

The VS team thinks this is a good first-step to improving the update process for Visual Studio. As long as it doesn’t spam the user constantly like Windows Update does, I can only see it as a good thing.

Adobe announced yesterday the 25th anniversary for Illustrator. The program launched on March 19, 1987 as the first program from a younger Adobe, who had previously only worked on PostScript. While it was originally meant to be a drawing tool for PostScript, Illustrator took off as a program wholly unique to itself.

Adobe Co-Founder John Wamock reflected on the impact Illustrator has had on the world in a post on Adobe Blog:

“Most people have no idea how many things in their lives were created in Illustrator. It’s not just packaging and logo design, it’s maps, car dashboards, shoes and watches,” said Brenda Sutherland, product manager, Adobe Illustrator. “From paper dolls to online avatars, from animated cartoons to collectable characters, Illustrator has touched us all.”

According to the blog post, Illustrator had two major impacts on the world of graphic design. It gave designers tools that let them “focus on what they wanted to create rather than how to do it.” They attribute this success to the use of vector graphics that made it easier to draw objects.

The company also sees Illustrator as having a major role in the digital publishing revolution. It helped graphic design go from a 20,000 employee industry to millions of people being able to create designs and graphics for products from food to toys and everything in between.

For a blast from the past, here’s the original demo video for Adobe Illustrator 1.1 from 1987. It’s pretty awesome to see how far the program has come from 1987 to 2012 when I was using it to build graphics for newspapers.

Here’s to 25 years, Adobe Illustrator. Hopefully we’ll be celebrating its 50th anniversary when it helps graphic designers make holographic images.

Comments

The Complexity Curve describes how a project moves from boundless opportunity and wonderful ideas to requirements checklists and constraints then finally (but only rarely) to simplicity and elegance. Where many projects call themselves complete when the necessary features have been included, few push forward and strive to deliver the pleasing and delightful experiences that arise from simplicity, focus, and purpose.

In this session, David M. Hogue, Ph.D. – VP of Experience Design, applied psychologist, and adjunct faculty member at San Francisco State University – will introduce the Complexity Curve, discuss why our innovative ideas seem to fade over the course of a project, explain why “feature complete” is not the same as “optimal experience”, and offer some methods for driving projects toward simplicity and elegance.”

David first made sure everyone had a seat. David is an applied psychologist and UI designer. Complexity is easier than simplicity. I agree and remember that Thelonius Monk said that simplicity was true genius. He sited the complexity of digital watches. I feel the pain here – I just remember for half the year my digital clocks like my car are an hour off as I do not know how to change them. My wrist watch is manual and I use my iPhone as a pocket watch.

David shared definitions of complexity. First he looked at designers. We hear words like: clean and simple, lots of negative speech, avoid noise. Also hierarchy is important. Then easy interactivity is key so you want to eliminate unnecessary content.  The goals are important. The IRS form is very complex. Structure is key. How are things connected and organized? The structure provides movements that make sense or confuse. The registration line at SXSW is a classic example of bad design.

Now he looked at the perspective people or users. This is very different than designers. People find that the Web often does not do what they do. The key tasks need to more upfront. People think of complexity in terms of relevance rather than visual design. The US Air Force has designed the controls of every plane in the same way. I wish cars did this, as every new rental car can be a challenge.

He moved on the chaos theory by Lorenz. This is the basis of Darwin Ecosystem, a content discovery tool I am connected with. He found the Lorenz attractor in a butterfly shape. Chaos has several characteristics. It is dynamic but it is deterministic but these are not predictable but it is not random. So you can find self–organizing systems. Darwin uses this to avoid SEO. So weather prediction is a bit better for few more days out but not long term. Some things are naturally complex. Lorenz equation had six variables.

Now David moved to the complexity curve for design. It seems simple at first but new features are raised, we come up with new ideas, reviewers want one more thing, and more and more. Then the system gets overloaded. Then go you get to point where all features are there but it is too complexity. How do you trim it down is hard? This is why there are many Flickr images on Web pages that suck.

There are three components of models; the mental model, the conceptual model, and the system model. These models need to be consistent for simplicity to occur. If you shift attention from task to interface that means there is a mismatch in models.

Design patterns are also key. We tend to borrow patterns that were successful elsewhere that do not work in new situations. Password security is a good example and I would agree completely. There are also dark patterns that do things like link you to ads when you do not want to do. We have to be careful when you are creating patterns. He gave the example of the Edsel that had a good and bad patterns and was a failure.

Scope increase is a challenge here. New stakeholders can cause havoc. Technical and legal requirements can be a problem, as well as marketing requirements.

High cognitive load leads to sense of complexity. If you have to think about stuff too much and it diverts us from real task. Declarative knowledge moves to procedural knowledge to automatic link driving a car. When you get to the automatic level it seems simple. You need to get people there.

We also do not want over simple.  As Einstein said, “everything should be as simple as possible and no simpler.” So now David started on how to make things simpler and move down the complexity curve.

We need to look for advances in technology to make things simpler. The digital watch was inspired by inclusion as a prop in the movie 2001. It took four years to make it work.

People are the next factor. Learning is sometimes essential, as we cannot make it simpler. Look for similar things that can serve as models. This can be very effective.

Designers should leverage their ignorance before that get to embedded in the project. Write down the ideas that people said could not work. Try to make it happen in new ways. Always put the end user first. Design for motivation, behavior, emotion, and creativity. We want feel happy and play. Need to watch conceptual models and make sure they align. Mental models can over time. Look at Blackberry vs. iPhone. A Blackberry was like a tiny laptop. The iPhone changed everything in mobile apps.

Simplicity is not just about reduction. He quoted Einstein again (see above). Use iteration. Watch what people are doing. Make it easier for people to do what they are already. The key ingredient is critical thinking. Think about what you are doing, Then take a things a few steps further. Then question things. There is no checklist here.

Great session.

Comments

Hopefully the situation doesn’t come to light like this:

A website manager sends an email on Friday saying, “We’re launching a new website on Monday, can you take a look at it to make sure our site optimization is ok?”.

The SEO gets access to the new site and finds a “pretty” home page with 90% images and/or Flash, “cool web 2.0″ navigation using Ajax and as a result of a new content management system, a URL syntax that is completely different than before. The icing on the cake is that all title/meta descriptions are now hard coded and there are 40% fewer pages because the Marketing Director read in a business magazine that “less is more”. I forgot to mention: The social share buttons have been moved to the boiler plate because they “distract from the design”.

The SEO participant in this situation is likely thinking: “This is going to be a long weekend”. While design changes for better user experience and CMS changes for more effective process and site maintenance are excellent things, making such changes without considering their impact on key marketing channels like search can be disastrous.

Updating a website is essential for companies to evolve in their respective industries, with customers and technology. Beyond the human audience, search engines and social applications represent important considerations as well. If not given the proper attention, the efforts invested in a better user experience or site management can result in a significant loss in online traffic and sales.

The answer to the potential loss of search traffic is no mystery. It’s called a SEO migration plan and is likely to be renamed a Social SEO migration plan as the importance of social media links and shares continue to grow. Consider these questions:

• Have you ever moved your website to a new domain name?
• Have you ever redesigned your website and maybe even implemented a new content management system?
• Has your company ever acquired a new company or merged with several other companies and you had to absorb one or more websites?

Each of these situations can be disastrous or pretty smooth depending on your decision to use a SEO migration plan. Or not.

Search represents a substantial portion of traffic that converts visitors into customers for websites that have been properly optimized, and even some that haven’t. Why put that investment at risk by not following best practices to mitigate negative effects? Why not make it easier for search engines (and users) to understand that you’ve made changes?

If you’ve recently changed your website, are in the thick of it now or plan on changing your website in a substantial way in the future, here are several key considerations from a content marketing and SEO perspective that will hopefully help you avoid shooting yourself in the foot.

Content Marketing is the thoughtful creation of content for specific audiences with a particular outcome in mind. It involves researching customer segments, understanding what their pain points and interests are across the buying cycle of awareness, interest, consideration, evaluation, purchase and advocacy. SEO savvy content marketers evolve that customer insight into topics and search keywords to fuel content creation and optimization for discovery through search engines.

When you change your website and especially your content, it’s important to maintain the flow of content and optimization across the buying cycle so you don’t “screw up” the good thing you have going. In fact, if you don’t have a good thing going, i.e. your content and SEO is more keyword centric than customer centric, now might be a good time to start.

SEO Migration Considerations

The approach can really vary according to the situation. If a company is simply changing their domain name, it’s a pretty straightforward process. If several websites are being combined into an all new site design along with substantial changes to content and a new content management system with a new hosting company, things are a bit more complex. Whatever your situation, here are steps worth considering:

• Understand and document what’s going to change
• Compare the existing website content map to the new, proposed site structure
• How will it affect in the organization? Outside agencies and consultants?
• Take benchmark measurements of website search performance metrics: organic search traffic, inbound links, social shares, page views, bounce rate, conversions
• Ensure content topics and keyword optimization of the new website continue the proper flow representing stages in the buying cycle
• Crawl the site to map all content and media: pages, other documents, images, video, etc
• Map old content to new content and plan redirects accordingly
• Implement 301 redirects when necessary at domain, category or page level
• If the new site does not contain comparable content, redirect to an upper level category
• Ensure custom 404 redirects are in place to catch any broken links
• Employ a full SEO audit and usability testing to determine continuity of search engine and user experience with the new site content/design
• Ensure HTML and XML sitemaps are properly available to search engines
• Identify top inbound link sources to the site. Which sources are most authoritative (SEO)? Which sources lead to the most conversions? Reach out to those link sources to see if they will link to the new version of the appropriate page
• Identify top converting keywords and content – pay careful attention to the quality of SEO copywriting, internal and external links to these pages so that the new version matches the old version as closely as possible
• After the new design implementation, execute redirects and submit site maps. Monitor ranking, search referrals, pages indexed and any crawling errors in Webmaster Tools
• Watch 404 Not Found errors to identify any issues with redirects and URLs

Certainly there’s more but the list above represents an essential framework of SEO and even a few content marketing considerations when companies make significant changes to their websites.

If you’re attending SES London this week, be sure to check out the “Site Redesign? Don’t Forget SEO Migration!” session at 3:30-4:30pm on Tuesday, 21 February. I’ll be presenting both SEO and Content Marketing considerations with a SEO Migration plan along with Russell O’Sullivan, the Digital Marketing Manager at Healthspan. Mike Grehan will be moderating, so there’s no doubt it will be a great session.

Of course, anyone who liveblogs the session will get a link from this post and promoted on our Twitter, FB and Google+ accounts. Liveblogging conferences is a win for all

Magazine style layout.

It is true that the popularity of print media and magazines is decreasing, but the layout of websites are taking over their design because it appeals to the readers. Placing thumbnails next to introductions or titles encourages readers to click and and read more. This method allows page visitors to spend more time on your page than they would usually.

Mobile applications.

As more users access the Internet using mobile devices, such as smart phones and computer tablets, having a compatible web page is essential for ease of accessibility. This means make sure your web design fits small screens or an alternate mobile page. Also, consider using the touch screen capability to your advantage by having a touch screen friendly design. That way, the user feels more connected to the page.

Unique typography.

It is true that, in the past, web designers stuck to a few fonts to use and avoided using unique typography for it made the web page have an amateur look to it. This is not the case these days, as a matter of fact, it might help increase your website’s visits because unique typography literally makes your page unique and stands out between the competition. Using unique typography, such as mixing and matching fonts within the same sentence, or to let some keywords stand out, is visually appealing to the readers and keeps the interested in visiting your site.

Large Graphics

We do not live in the dial-up era anymore, when a picture took time and bandwidth to download. web designers now feel free to include large pictures within the layout of the web site. Images, generally speaking, are very appealing to the eyes, so use a picture as a background for the text you write instead of a solid color, and use images and thumbnails unique for each content.

Integration with Social Media

It is very important for a web designer to consider interactivity and utilizes it to the maximum while designing the layout. This means having buttons or a way to link your website to social media pages such as Facebook, Twitter, etc. should be integrated in the design.

Utilize these tips and tools the next time you consider updating the layout of your website. Keep yourself up to date with the latest trends in graphic design for they change dramatically with time.

What is this new ‘Page layout algorithm’?
Google has revealed in a post that the algorithm will work against a site with pages where the ads far outweigh the content. This move by the search engine is again following a user generated demand that they want to see the content they were searching for and not be bombarded by ads.

Quoting Google, “So sites that don’t have much content “above-the-fold” can be affected by this change. If you click on a website and the part of the website you see first either doesn’t have a lot of visible content above-the-fold or dedicates a large fraction of the site’s initial screen real estate to ads, that’s not a very good user experience. Such sites may not rank as highly going forward.”

As per a similar post on the Google Webmaster Central blog, the sites that use pop-ups, pop-unders or overlay ads will not be impacted by the algorithm.

What number of ads above the fold will bring you in the red zone?
Post this announcement, the next obvious query was – “How many ads? Where does one draw the line?”
According to the blog post Google says, “We understand that placing ads above-the-fold is quite common for many websites; these ads often perform well and help publishers monetize online content. This algorithmic change does not affect sites who place ads above-the-fold to a normal degree, but affects sites that go much further to load the top of the page with ads to an excessive degree or that make it hard to find the actual original content on the page.”

Well, search experts have discussed this with Google and the head of Google’s web spam team, Matt Cutts has been sourced as saying that by using tools like Google Browser Size, webmasters can make an estimation as to the amount of page’s content is visible to users vis a vis the ads (under various screen resolutions). However, Matt Cutts has also said that this algorithm will impact less than 1% of Google’s searches globally, in perfect tandem with what has been written in the blog post by Google.

What if you are hit and then set the ads right?
In case you are hit by the algorithm, you will have to wait for a couple of weeks to get your ranking back. Just reduce ads above-the-fold, give your content more prominence and wait. Google will make a note of the changes and will integrate into its overall ranking system, in a few weeks. As Google says, “If you decide to update your page layout, the page layout algorithm will automatically reflect the changes as we re-crawl and process enough pages from your site to assess the changes. How long that takes will depend on several factors, including the number of pages on your site and how efficiently Googlebot can crawl the content. On a typical website, it can take several weeks for Googlebot to crawl and process enough pages to reflect layout changes on the site.”

Did you get the Google AdSense email?
On one hand heavy ads pages are being penalized, on the other hand, Google AdSense has emailed bloggers, encouraging them to put more ads on their site. Here is the mail:

As per the mail, you have to place you ads carefully keeping in mind the user experience.
What do you think of Google’s move? Will you have to change your page layout? Do leave your comments.

Comments

If you unfamiliar with the Adobe Lightroom software, it’s essentially a photography workflow solution that allows you to quickly import, manage, and enhance your photos from the same workspace.

“Giving early customer access to new versions of Lightroom has helped our team deliver an outstanding battle-tested product that really stands up to the demands of photographers worldwide,” said Winston Hendrickson, vice president of Digital Imaging Products, Adobe. “The much anticipated release of Lightroom 4 beta continues this tradition and shows how much Adobe values customer insights into photography workflows.”

New Features in Lightroom 4 Beta:

• Highlight and shadow recovery brings out all the detail that your camera captures in dark shadows and bright highlights.
• Photo book creation with easy-to-use elegant templates.
• Location-based organization lets you find and group images by location, assign locations to images, and display data from GPS-enabled cameras.
• White balance brush to refine and adjust white balance in specific areas of your images.
• Additional local editing controls let you adjust noise reduction and remove moiré in targeted areas of your images.
• Extended video support for organizing, viewing, and making adjustments and edits to video clips.
• Easy video publishing lets you edit and share video clips on Facebook and Flickr®.
• Soft proofing to preview how an image will look when printed with color-managed printers.
• Email directly from Lightroom using the email account of your choice.

Adobe urges photographers to give the beta release a try and let them know what you think about the software.

Download: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/lightroom4/

GIMP (GNU Image Manipulation Program) is a raster graphics editor that can be downloaded for free, and it is available for the Windows, Mac, and Linux platforms.

To remove the red eyes from a photo, please follow the steps that I have provided below.

1. Within GIMP, open the image in question that has the red eyes that you would like removed.
2. After the file has been opened in GIMP, increase the zoom to 200%. To do this, click on the down arrow beside the percentage under the image. This will make the image easier to work with.
   
   
3. From the Toolbox, select the Ellipse Select Tool and drag an area around one of the red eyes that you want to remove so that the iris of the eye is selected.
   
   

   

4. From the Filters menu and the Enhance submenu, click on the Red Eye Removal menu item. This will open the Red Eye Removal window and display a preview of what the eye will look like with the red coloring removed.
   
   
5. If you are satisfied with the preview of the eye within the Red Eye Removal window, press the OK button, and the eye of the person will automatically revert back to its original color.
   
6. Repeat from steps 3-5 to duplicate this process with the other red eye.