Getting creative

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Adobe Systems marked the Middle East launch of its new Creative Suite 5 (CS5) product family with the Adobe Beach Bash. Creative professionals, from architects to interior designers, photographers to gamers, and animators to artists, were invited to attend the event, which took place at The Ritz Carlton Hotel, Dubai on May 8.

Alongside its partners, HP, Nivida, WinSoft and others, Adobe presented five live demonstration islands – including Photography Island, Flash & Gaming Island and Calligraphy Island – offering a first glimpse of the latest video, print and web tools from the newly-launched CS5, in action.

The new CS5 family offers over 250 new features that are designed to embrace interactivity, enhance performance and maximise the impact of creative content and digital marketing campaigns. Interior designers will be particularly interested in Photoshop’s enhanced ability to handle 3D objects, or Illustrator’s ability to design on perspective planes, noted Joe Karkour, business development manager – creative, Adobe Systems Middle East.

“CS5 also gives you the ability to move your work from any print design to the web. That’s something that interior designers definitely look for because they all have websites, online portfolios and galleries that they need to be able to update. Traditionally, they would have to give that work to a website developer. Today we integrate all the web tools inside the Creative Suites.

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“It makes it much easier to go from print to web to other different media – so different screens, for example, from mobile phones to computers to TV screens,” Karkour explained. “Imagine an interior designer going to a customer with their portfolio on their Blackberry, for example. Why not?”

When it comes to interior design, technology has a massive role to play, Karkour continued. “First of all it enhances productivity, and time to market. At the end of the day, interior designers are selling a product. The faster they can go to present and the faster they can meet their deadlines, the faster they can get their jobs done. CS5 is mainly about productivity, about how all the different tools integrate together. You design in Photoshop, you import to Illustrator. You design in Illustrator, you take to In Design. And the structure of the data is maintained. All the applications across the creative suites exchange documents very easily and that is the most important part of CS5 – its creativity.”

After all, technology exists to facilitate and enhance the creative process – rather than hinder it, Karkour noted. “Creativity should not be limited by the tools. You should be able to use the tools to unleash the creativity.”

Ultimately, designers must be masters of the technology that they use, rather than slaves to it. “There’s a danger of this happening if the tools are not properly presented. With CS5, this is what we won’t be seeing, because the tools are so easy to use.

“You should never work your creativity around the tools that you have at hand. This is what I stress to my customers – get the proper training on the tools you use.”

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