There are so many different factors to consider when designing a website. Screen resolution, browser and browser version can all affect how a website is viewed and need to be considered before the design process can begin.

With the boom of social media we now have a greater opportunity to share our ideas, techniques and inspirations. Twitter and Facebook are the two that first spring to mind but for artists there are a few specifically tailored to meet our needs.

The idea behind the cover was to be simple and stylish with a clear-cut message; something that would easily be spotted from a distance but not too garish. I liked the idea of creating a mosaic with past issue covers but it had been done before so I was wary about how to approach the method.

In this post I want to show you the design process behind the cover for the 50th Issue, demonstrating some techniques and resources that I commonly use when producing Grey Matter’s magazine.

One of my principle tasks as a graphic designer working for Grey Matter is to provide effective landing pages for our partners to sell their products.

These need to be fairly simple but deliver a straightforward message to the customer about various products or services.

The Flash/HTML5 debate is nothing new amongst developers and over the past year the for and against argument for each tool has circulated the web causing

Adobe has launched Technical Communication Suite 3, which bundles FrameMaker 10, RoboHelp 9, Captivate 5, Photoshop CS5 and Acrobat X. FrameMaker and RoboHelp are Windows-only, so the suite is the same.

I’m at the Adobe MAX conference in Los Angeles, and last night attended a couple of the “Meet the team” events where a bunch of Adobe engineers, product managers and others field questions about the products they are working on.

Adobe has announced Acrobat X (pronounced Acrobat ten), the latest PDF document creator with its associated free reader, which will be available soon.

Adobe has announced Acrobat X (pronounced Acrobat ten), the latest PDF document creator with its associated free reader, which will be available in November.

Adobe’s Duane Nickull has an illuminating post on how the Flash player handles REST. Nickull is responding to a post by Malcolm Box in which he complains how hard it is to use Flash with a REST web service.

Adobe has acquired Day Software, a company which specialises in web content management. It will be interesting to see if it influences controversial issues with Flash Player and Adobe's open source projects.

Microsoft has released a PivotViewer control for Silverlight. Data visualisation is a key business reason to use Silverlight or Flash rather than HTML and JavaScript for an application, so it is a significant release. But what does it do?

I’ve just installed the third Internet Explorer Platform Preview (on a virtual machine just in case) and run through a few of the demos. One of the most impressive is Canvas Pad, which demonstrates the HTML 5 Canvas element.



Canvas is particularly interesting, since it provides a surface to which you can draw anything you like. Canvas support was not announced at Mix earlier this year, when IE9 was unveiled, and some of us speculated that Microsoft would omit it in order to preserve the value of its Silverlight plugin – though in doing so it would also help Adobe Flash. Well, apparently the IE9 team decided to risk it. Not only is canvas supported; it is also hardware-accelerated:

...

Adobe has released its financial results for its second quarter, reporting $227.3 million net income (GAAP) compared to $161.4 million in the same quarter last year; and revenue of $943 million which it says is 34% year on year growth.

Much of this is thanks to a successful launch for Creative Suite 5, which accounts for 56% of Adobe’s revenue. However, Adobe has also reported 12% year-on-year growth for LiveCycle, its enterprise server products about which I learned last week in Amsterdam. The “platform” segment, which includes the Flex development tools, Cold Fusion, and Flash media services, is also growing, from $36.8 million in Q2 2009 to $45.4 million in Q2 2010.

CEO Shantanu Narayen is upbeat, saying “we believe Adobe is significantly undervalued today” and backing his judgement with a share buyback program.

I was particularly interested in the focus on Flash in Adobe’s statements and conference call:

Approximately 3.5 million Flash designers and developers are working with Flash-based solutions today, and their ranks grew by 59 percent in 2009

...