The New Breed of Web Designer

The hallmark of geek ADDness is the ability to drop whatever it is you are currently doing in hot pursuit of the shiny, new thing you’ve just discovered. And what does this have to do with a blog post on the new breed of web designer? Nothing really, except that in the process of exploring FeedRaider, I diverged into checking out posts about the Web 2.0 Expo, which in turn led me to a blog post by Richard McManus his Read/WriteWeb blog on a panel on hybrid design at the expo, which then prompted me to write this post. I guess I have severe geek ADD.

So what are the characteristics of this new breed of designer? To quote:

Writing semantic markup (transition to XML)
Providing Web services (moving away from place)
Remixing content (about when and what, not who or why)
Emergent navigation and relevance (users are in control)
Adding metadata over time (communities building social information)
Shift to programming (separation of structure and style)

Also check out a visual representation of the above summary.

And I just remembered, I still have to check out FeedRaider, don’t I?

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Published in: on April 20, 2007 at 12:14 pm Comments (1)

Adobe CS3

Adobe trotted out their dog-and-pony shows today to demo CS3 and highlight some of the new features. The first thing that caught my eye was that the application icons have changed. Instead of abstract images, they now how an abbreviated version of the application name on a colored background – - for instance “FL” on red for Flash. They almost look like the color blocks you play with in kindergarten! I took specific note of new features in Photoshop and their Web design products, these caught my eye in Photoshop:

  • Quick Selection Tool – an easy way to select a part of an image to separate it from it’s background.
  • Refine Edges – allows you to refine the edges of a selection.
  • Smart Filters that allow you to apply effects selectively.
  • The Toolbox is a single column now and the app seems more panel driven.

All their products in their different suites have been upgraded to work on the newer OSs on the Windows machines and Macs including Windows Vista and Intel Macs. There are also some new features in Dreamweaver including a CSS advisor and an HTML advisor, but I may have to attend the Web products sessions to get more on that bundle.

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Published in: on April 10, 2007 at 5:59 pm Comments (1)