Specific fonts required to run Illustrator and Dreamweaver

Beware: if you don't have all four styles of Verdana (regular, bold, italic, and bold italic) installed, Illustrator CC will crash. Many users basically ignore Verdana. Installing Microsoft Office, and perhaps other apps, may install new versions of Verdana and Tahoma, which could screw things up and cause Illustrator to crash.

More information about this can be found on the Illustrator forum.

To run Dreamweaver CC, you must have Verdana and Tahoma installed. But at least Dreamweaver notifies you of the problem.

CS5.5 announced

Today Adobe announced Creative Suite 5.5. If you'll recall, CS 5 was announced April 12, 2010 and began shipping on April 30, 2010. Adobe has indicated that their intent is to ship a new version of the Creative Suite every 2 years, with a mid-cycle "dot release" to address current technology changes and trends.

See Adobe.com and Adobe TV for a good overview of the new features and capabilities suite-wide. See InDesignSecrets for a good rundown of the new features in InDesign CS 5.5.

Bottom line: The update contains Acrobat X, changes to InDesign, InCopy, Flash Catalyst, Flash Professional, Dreamweaver, After Effects, Audition, Device Central, and Media Encoder, as well as a new (optional) subscription pricing model, and integration of the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. Note specifically that this update doesn't add any new features to Illustrator or Photoshop.

Dreamweaver seminar in Minneapolis

My friend Chris Converse is coming to Minneapolis on October 7, 2010 for an all-day Dreamweaver/CSS seminar. Chris is the best in the business. I have no doubt that this will be an excellent seminar. If you do Web design, or want to learn more about Web design, check it out!

Becoming an ACE

I'm frequently asked about the best way to prepare to become ACE certified in Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator, Acrobat or other Adobe products.

An Adobe Certified Expert (ACE) "is a person who has demonstrated a professional level in proficiency with one or more Adobe software products." The steps to become an ACE are listed here. The primary task is to complete a "product proficiency exam" on the product for which you're seeking certification.

These exams aren't easy. They involve setting up a testing appointment at your closest Adobe-affiliated testing center, going to the testing location, and completing a 1-2 hour test. The tests are multiple-choice, presented on a computer screen. The toughest part is that you will not have the software in front of you to refer to while you're taking the test. So you have to know your stuff.

The key to preparation is to study the exam preparation guides. These guides detail exactly what topic areas of the program will be covered on the test, as well as what percentages of the test questions will pertain to each topic. In addition, each guide contains several sample questions.

For example, the InDesign CS4 guide says that there will be 4 questions (6% of the total test questions) on "working with tables". It goes on to say that you need to know how to modify tables, edit and format a table, create, apply, import, modify, and organize cell and table styles, and update the information in a table when the original data has changed. The exam guide gives similar detail for the other seven topic areas that will be covered.

So the key to passing the test is to study the exam guide, and learn and practice the topic areas that you don't know well.

Other helpful resources:

* Mike Rankin has written The InDesignSecrets Guide to the InDesign CS4 ACE Exam, helpful in preparing for that exam.

* exam aids has created simulated ACE tests for many Adobe products to help users prepare for the ACE exams.

Creative Suite 5 announced

Finally, the cat's out of the bag. Adobe announced Creative Suite 5 today. I'm really impressed with this release. For designers, there's something for everyone. But you might have to dig beyond Adobe's marketing messaging to discover the features and improvements that will affect you.

Begin by watching the 35 minute launch video. This will give you a general idea of where Adobe thinks the design market is headed in the future. Don't expect to see a lot of coverage of InDesign, Photoshop and Illustrator. In fact, at least the first 5 and last 5 minutes are devoted to Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Omniture, Flash Media Server, Scene7 and Business Catalyst. These are all products that don't directly impact the lives of most designers...today. But don't despair! There are HUGE improvements for designers using InDesign, Illustrator, Photoshop, Flash and Dreamweaver in CS5.

Much will be written about the many new features both here and elsewhere in the upcoming weeks and months. But right now, one way to get a sense of what's new is to view AdobeTV and visit the "What's New" page on Adobe.com for each product. Here are some links directly to that content.

InDesign [AdobeTV] [What's New]
Photoshop [AdobeTV] [What's New]
Illustrator [AdobeTV] [What's New]
Flash Professional [AdobeTV] [What's New]
Dreamweaver [AdobeTV] [What's New]

My friends over at InDesignSecrets have compiled a detailed writeup of many of the new features of InDesign. A must-read if you use InDesign.

Flash Catalyst is a brand-new application that's bundled with Creative Suite Design Premium, Web Premium and Master Collection. I'm really excited about this application. I've been using it a lot and will be writing more about it here in the future. Flash Catalyst allows designers to create interactive content without writing code, using Illustrator and Photoshop as a starting point. Learn more about it here, or see it on AdobeTV.

Besides the big shiny new features for each product, the InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop development teams all spent a lot of time smoothing off rough edges, polishing existing features, and adding "little things" that customers have been requesting. The Photoshop team called this process JDI (Just Do It). One could argue that for some users, these little things equal the big shiny features in importance for day-to-day productivity.

If it seems hard to keep up, consider this. Adobe has released 5 versions of the Suite in less than 7 years! The first verson of Creative Suite was released in October 2003. Whew!

Adobe expects to ship English language versions of Creative Suite 5 by mid-May 2010.

Preview Web sites across browsers with Adobe Browserlab

If you design Web sites, particularly with CSS, you know the frustration of trying to make a page look the way you want in different browsers. This is a constant battle for Web designers.

Adobe is showing a cool new technology at Adobe Labs called Adobe BrowserLab. Currently in "free preview" status, BrowserLab lets you quickly preview what a Web page looks like in several different browsers. When you enter a url into the address field in BrowserLab, this address is sent to a "server farm" of real computers running clean installations of the browsers and operating system you choose. A screen shot of the result is sent back to you for viewing and comparison. You can easily save these screen shots as jpeg files for client presentation.

Adobe isn't the one doing this. Competitors include BrowserShots, BrowserCam, Browsrcamp, Total Validator, AnyBrowser and NetMechanic. However, what really sets Adobe Browserlab apart from the competition is integration with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4. If you download the BrowserLab Extensions for Dreamweaver, you can easily view various states of dynamically built pages in different browsers.

For example, if I want to see what a particular drop-down menu looks like on my Web site, I can open the page in Dreamweaver, click on the Live View button, pull down a menu, and hit F6 to "freeze" the JavaScript. Then, I choose command-shift-F12 to preview the page in BrowserLab, and within a few seconds, I get the result shown below.

Three local educational opportunities

The InDesignSecrets Live, 2010 Tour with Anne-Marie Concepción is coming to Minneapolis on March 17. (I'll be one of the speakers at the InDesignSecrets Print and ePublishing Conference May 12-14 2010 at the Adobe Campus in Seattle, WA.) Contact me for a discount code for either of these events.

Flashbelt, a conference for "new media designers, developers and enthusiasts" is scheduled for June 13-16 2010 in Minneapolis.

An Event Apart, "an intensely educational two-day conference for passionate practitioners of standards-based web design" is coming to Minneapolis July 26-27 2010.

Minnesota Dreamweavers User Group

A new user group has formed in the Twin Cities: The Minnesota Dreamweavers User Group. The user group is organized by Keith Gulsvig and sponsored by Central Coast Solutions and Hennepin Technical College. If you're interested in all things Web (and you should be!), this is a good free local resource.

Minnesota Dreamweavers User Group, Wednesday, January 27th.

This month's meeting will be a panel discussion focusing on where the web is today, and where it's going. The panel consists of professionals active in various aspects of website creation and management.

At the end of the evening there will a drawing for door prizes.

This meeting is FREE and open to the public.

Wednesday, January 27, 2010

7:00 PM to 9:00 PM

Hennepin Technical College - Auditorium

Brooklyn Park Campus

9000 Brooklyn Boulevard, Brooklyn Park, MN 55445

New web site

I just spent the last few days hunkered down in my office wrestling with the intricacies of CSS while rebuilding the Gilbert Consulting web site. My previous web site used tables for layout and positioning. I decided to join the 21st century and bring my site up to modern standards with CSS. Hopefully the new site also does a better job of explaining who I am, what I do and how I do it.

A few interesting items I ran across while sweating through the web site rebuild:

• Adobe's Dreamweaver Developer Center houses all kinds of CSS goodness, tutorials and links.
  
  
• I found Pop Menu Magic 2 from Project Seven very helpful for creating the menu system. The newsgroups run by Project Seven at forums.projectseven.com were invaluable for troubleshooting a couple of thorny issues with the menus and CSS.
  
  
• The inclusion of the O'Reilly CSS Reference Guide in the Dreamweaver CS4 Reference panel is great. Concise O'Reilly guides for HTML, JavaScript, XML, PHP and other syntax are also included in the Reference panel.