Adobe Illustrator CS4 is a time-proven production drawing tool with a clean, efficient interface, and well- thought-out tools that work seamlessly with the rest of the Adobe creative suite. Adobe Illustrator CS4: Mac OS (Full Retail Version USED & NEW) $199.99 to $299.99. The Adobe Illustrator CS4 Wow! Book - Paperback By Steuer, Sharon - GOOD.
Buy. Download. Create. Get Illustrator CS4 now at the Adobe Store.
Get Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop Extended with Adobe Web Premium CS4.
Try before you buy. Download any Adobe product for a free 30 day trial.
Adobe Illustrator CS4 - Free Trial Download - 30 Day Free Trial
The Adobe Illustrator CS4 Free Trial is not available yet, but you can download the Fireworks CS4 Beta, or the Illustrator CS3 Free Trial. Read our Top Reasons To Upgrade To Adobe Illustrator CS4 - New Features List below.
Free Illustrator CS4 Videos From lynda.com
We have 2 great free Illustrator CS4 video tutorials for you from lynda.com. Both of these are high quality videos that will show you some of the amazing new features in Adobe Illustrator CS4.
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Multiple Artboards
Mordy Golding walks through one the most anticipated new features in Illustrator CS4, multiple artboards. With multiple artboards, you can keep related, but separate and even differently sized artwork together in a single document. Mordy shows you how to create a document with multiple artboards from scratch, how to add, edit, and delete artboards within the document’s canvas using the new Artboard tool, and some handy shortcuts for navigating an Illustrator document with multiple artboards.
Watch the Multiple Artboards - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Enhanced Clipping Masks
Mordy Golding examines the new clipping mask behavior in Illustrator CS4. The new un-selectable state of the clipping mask makes it easier to work with your transformed artwork. Review how to create a mask from scratch and then learn how you can also modify the mask in the new Isolation Mode.
Watch the Enhanced CLipping Masks - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Adobe Illustrator CS4 Tutorials
On our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page you can find links to free Illustrator CS4 tutorials, Illustrator CS4 video tutorials, and Illustrator CS4 tips and tricks.
Top Reasons To Upgrade To Adobe Illustrator CS4 - New Features List
Transparency in gradients
Define the opacity of any individual color stop in a gradient. Reveal underlying objects and images, and create rich color and texture mixes using multiple layers, knockouts, and cover-up fades.
Blob Brush tool
Sketch with a brush that generates a single clean vector shape, even when strokes overlap. Draw naturally, using the Blob Brush tool together with the Eraser and Smooth tools.
Gradients exposed
Interact with gradients right on your object. Set gradient angle, position, and elliptical dimensions. Add and edit colors using sliders--all with immediate feedback where you work.
Multiple artboards
Create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes and display them any way you want--overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Save, export, and print artboards independently or together. Save a selected range or all artboards as a multipage PDF file.
Integration and delivery
Collaborate with your team, work across products, and deliver almost anywhere thanks to integrated tools and extensive format support. Confidently design for print, interactive experiences, motion effects, and more.
Enhanced user experience
Stay in the creative groove thanks to interface improvements that include on-object controls. Interact with tools smoothly, and increase your efficiency using new timesaving features and shortcuts.
In-panel appearance editing
Edit object characteristics directly in the Appearance panel, eliminating the need to open fill, stroke, or effects panels. Work with shared attributes and control display for faster rendering.
Refined graphic styles
Combine styles for unique effects and increased efficiency, and apply styles without disturbing an object's existing appearance. Enjoy new thumbnail previews and an expanded library of prebuilt styles.
Clipping masks demystified
Work with masks more easily by viewing only the clipped area of your objects during editing. Take advantage of Isolation Mode, and use Edit Clipping Path for even more control.
Separations Preview
Avoid color output surprises such as unexpected spot colors, unwanted overprinting, overprints that don't overprint, white overprinting, and CMYK blacks in text and placed files.
Adobe Illustrator CS4 & CS4 Design Premium- Best Deals From Adobe
Design quickly and confidently with Adobe Illustrator CS4 software. Sophisticated tools for drawing and typography, along with advanced color controls and creative effects, provide a comprehensive vector graphics environment.
Explore more efficient ways of working with multiple artboards, a Blob Brush tool for intuitive vector painting, and transparency in gradients with on-object controls. Stay ahead of the pace of change — equip yourself with precisely the tools you need for today’s print, web, interactive, motion, and mobile content design.
You can design with multiple artboards and create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes. Display the artboards any way you want — overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Learn more on our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page. To download the free trial, see details on our Illustrator CS4 Free Trial Download Page.
Find upgrade options and package deals at the Adobe USA Store. Teachers and students get special pricing at the Adobe Education Store. You can also buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium - Complete CS4 Bundle
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software is the designer's dream toolkit for print, web, and mobile publishing. Creativity is rarely confined to one medium, so put your vector illustrations in motion, moving fluidly between Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. And use Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended to design and slice a web page for publishing with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium combines essential tools for producing everything from professional page layouts to rich interactive experiences in a unified, intuitive environment. Also includes Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe InDesign CS4, plus Adobe Fireworks CS4.
Buy now or download the free trial at the Adobe USA Store, or buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Fireworks Beta
The Fireworks beta is an opportunity for web designers, web architects, and developers to participate in a prerelease program. This program provides you with early access to our next release so that you can kick the tires and ensure that it meets your needs. Download the prerelease of the next version of Fireworks now and send in your feedback. The Fireworks beta will expire soon after the next version of Fireworks is available for purchase. New features in the next version of Fireworks include:
New user interface
Switch from Adobe Photoshop®, Illustrator®, and Flash — with the ease and familiarity of universal user interface design.
CSS and Images Export
Design complete web pages in Fireworks’ robust graphic environment, and then export web standards–compliant, CSS-based layouts, complete with external style sheets in one step.
PDF export
Generate high-fidelity, interactive, secure PDF documents from your Fireworks design comps for enhanced client communication.
Live Style improvements
Now when you update a style, all the elements the style has been applied to are instantly updated. Individual instances can break away from the style with a click of the Properties panel icon.
Adobe type engine
Produce superior type designs with the enhanced typesetting capabilities of Adobe Type Engine, familiar to users of Photoshop and Illustrator and now available in Fireworks. Import or copy and paste double-byte characters from Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop without loss of fidelity. Float text inside a path for high impact text logos.
AIR authoring
Create your AIR interactive prototype directly within Fireworks, ready to be deployed to HTML and CSS, Flex, or Flash.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom In A Book
This thorough guide to Adobe Illustrator CS3, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book is ideal for beginning users who want to master the key features of Adobe's powerful vector drawing software. Using clear, step-by-step lessons, each chapter contains a project that builds upon the reader's growing knowledge of the software, while review questions at the end of each chapter reinforce key concepts and skills.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book will get you up to speed. Adobe Illustrator CS3 is jam-packed with new features and enhancements, including Live Color, a new environment that enables users to explore, apply, and save custom color configurations; improved integration with Adobe Flash CS3, which ensures that your vector illustrations import effortlessly to Flash with their anchor point positions, layers, and paths intact; a new Eraser tool, which lets users quickly modify objects or create entirely new shapes; a new Crop Area tool, which lets users set up a workspace so that it's automatically primed for the type of media that will display their design, whether it's print, Web, video, or film; new document profiles, newly improved drawing tools and controls, and much more.
Whether you're brand-new to Adobe Illustrator or are looking for a project-based tutorial to familiarize yourself with Illustrator CS3's new features, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book provides you with the key techniques and tips you need to get the most out of this software.
SiteGrinder 2 — Photoshop Plugin Review
Review by Jennifer Apple
There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.
Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.
Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder 2 seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder 2, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.
So how does it work? Think for a second about the normal flow of work for any web design project. You'll spend a great deal of your time designing the visual appearance of your website in Photoshop, only to turn around and spend even more time working with a code editor like Dreamweaver or GoLive, going through the labor-intensive process of reconstructing these designs for the web.
Not to mention that fact that your creativity is often significantly limited when you're using a design program that's completely separate from the program that's used to prep everything for the web. Not everything that you design will be functional when it's translated to the web, nor will it be compatible with all web browsers period! As such, you'll often find yourself not going that extra creative mile just because you know that your web developer will have to re-work your designs just to make sure that they can be used online.
Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
SiteGrinder 2 throws all these considerations to the wind. By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.
With SiteGrinder 2, you can easily convert Photoshop Type layers into CSS styled web text. Virtually all of Photoshop's character and paragraph styles are supported by CSS, so you'll be able to ensure a smooth transition from workspace to web browser. This includes everything from bold and italic to paragraph spacing and alignment. Even hyperlinking is made easy, as SiteGrinder 2 will automatically turn any HTTP and e-mail URLs into hyperlinks.
Create Buttons, Rollovers, Popups & Menus
Likewise, SiteGrinder 2 will convert image layers to web graphics, generating automatically the HTML needed to display your images on your website exactly where you had positioned them in Photoshop. All the basic elements of any standard website are also easy to achieve by using SiteGrinder 2 with Photoshop, which allows you to create buttons, rollovers, pop-ups and menus. Pretty much all you have to do is tell SiteGrinder 2 about special layers by including 'hints' when you name the layers – simply include 'button', 'rollover' or 'pop-up' in your layer name and SiteGrinder 2 will create your preferred interactive feature automatically.
No Tables Here — SiteGrinder Produces Valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS
It's also a breeze to create a multipage website from a single Photoshop document, by using a Photoshop tool called the Layer Comps palette. Often overlooked, this incredibly powerful little tool lets you save and name particular document states, including the position and visibility of every layer. To create multiple pages, all you have to do is make the document look the way that you want a page on your site to look, and then make a layer comp — then set up the next page and make another layer comp, and so on. SiteGrinder 2 will then use these comps to figure out what to include on the web pages that it will generate for you. It's as easy as that!
SiteGrinder 2 effectively functions as your very own web technician, who knows all there is to know about CSS, HTML and other complex web formats.
You don't need to spend precious time and money learning the intricacies of web-speak when SiteGrinder 2 can do all this work for you, leaving you with much more time and freedom to explore the limits of your creative potential in the Photoshop world you know so well.
Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder 2 can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - PhotoshopCAFE Video Training
Even if you have no prior experience, Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration by Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE.com fame will teach you what you need to know to create websites that will blow the competition out of the water.
Based on the book Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration, this 2 1/2 hour DVD ROM shows you how to plan, design and launch your website.
Combining the 2 most popular web design tools, Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, you’ll learn the workflow that the pros use. In a simple step-by-step, plain English approach, Colin will show you exactly what you need to know. This one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional web sites.
• Set Photoshop preferences
• Create eye candy
• Use repeating patterns
• Make a final design comp
• Create roll-over effects
• Optimize gif, jpg and png
• Define a site in Dreamweaver
• Convert Photoshop designs to HTML
• Understand and use CSS
• Use Dreamweaver templates
• Embed Flash in Dreamweaver
• Improve Search Engine ranking
• Create remote rollovers
• Add Drop-down menus
• And more...
The simple-to-use interface lets you jump to any lesson with complete control over the playback. All the lesson files are included, so you can easily follow along.
About Colin Smith
An award winning designer, best-selling author and trainer, Colin is founder of one of the world's most popular Photoshop resource sites, PhotoshopCAFE.com. Colin is also a regular columnist for Advanced Photoshop, Computer Arts, and Photoshop User Magazine.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - Special Discount Price
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - $44.99 - (DVD version)
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration Download - $44.99 - (instant download)
The Adobe Illustrator CS4 Free Trial is not available yet, but you can download the Fireworks CS4 Beta, or the Illustrator CS3 Free Trial. Read our Top Reasons To Upgrade To Adobe Illustrator CS4 - New Features List below.
Free Illustrator CS4 Videos From lynda.com
We have 2 great free Illustrator CS4 video tutorials for you from lynda.com. Both of these are high quality videos that will show you some of the amazing new features in Adobe Illustrator CS4.
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Multiple Artboards
Mordy Golding walks through one the most anticipated new features in Illustrator CS4, multiple artboards. With multiple artboards, you can keep related, but separate and even differently sized artwork together in a single document. Mordy shows you how to create a document with multiple artboards from scratch, how to add, edit, and delete artboards within the document’s canvas using the new Artboard tool, and some handy shortcuts for navigating an Illustrator document with multiple artboards.
Watch the Multiple Artboards - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Enhanced Clipping Masks
Mordy Golding examines the new clipping mask behavior in Illustrator CS4. The new un-selectable state of the clipping mask makes it easier to work with your transformed artwork. Review how to create a mask from scratch and then learn how you can also modify the mask in the new Isolation Mode.
Watch the Enhanced CLipping Masks - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Adobe Illustrator CS4 Tutorials
On our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page you can find links to free Illustrator CS4 tutorials, Illustrator CS4 video tutorials, and Illustrator CS4 tips and tricks.
Top Reasons To Upgrade To Adobe Illustrator CS4 - New Features List
Transparency in gradients
Define the opacity of any individual color stop in a gradient. Reveal underlying objects and images, and create rich color and texture mixes using multiple layers, knockouts, and cover-up fades.
Blob Brush tool
Sketch with a brush that generates a single clean vector shape, even when strokes overlap. Draw naturally, using the Blob Brush tool together with the Eraser and Smooth tools.
Gradients exposed
Interact with gradients right on your object. Set gradient angle, position, and elliptical dimensions. Add and edit colors using sliders--all with immediate feedback where you work.
Multiple artboards
Create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes and display them any way you want--overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Save, export, and print artboards independently or together. Save a selected range or all artboards as a multipage PDF file.
Integration and delivery
Collaborate with your team, work across products, and deliver almost anywhere thanks to integrated tools and extensive format support. Confidently design for print, interactive experiences, motion effects, and more.
Enhanced user experience
Stay in the creative groove thanks to interface improvements that include on-object controls. Interact with tools smoothly, and increase your efficiency using new timesaving features and shortcuts.
In-panel appearance editing
Edit object characteristics directly in the Appearance panel, eliminating the need to open fill, stroke, or effects panels. Work with shared attributes and control display for faster rendering.
Refined graphic styles
Combine styles for unique effects and increased efficiency, and apply styles without disturbing an object's existing appearance. Enjoy new thumbnail previews and an expanded library of prebuilt styles.
Clipping masks demystified
Work with masks more easily by viewing only the clipped area of your objects during editing. Take advantage of Isolation Mode, and use Edit Clipping Path for even more control.
Separations Preview
Avoid color output surprises such as unexpected spot colors, unwanted overprinting, overprints that don't overprint, white overprinting, and CMYK blacks in text and placed files.
Adobe Illustrator CS4 & CS4 Design Premium- Best Deals From Adobe
Design quickly and confidently with Adobe Illustrator CS4 software. Sophisticated tools for drawing and typography, along with advanced color controls and creative effects, provide a comprehensive vector graphics environment.
Explore more efficient ways of working with multiple artboards, a Blob Brush tool for intuitive vector painting, and transparency in gradients with on-object controls. Stay ahead of the pace of change — equip yourself with precisely the tools you need for today’s print, web, interactive, motion, and mobile content design.
You can design with multiple artboards and create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes. Display the artboards any way you want — overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Learn more on our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page. To download the free trial, see details on our Illustrator CS4 Free Trial Download Page.
Find upgrade options and package deals at the Adobe USA Store. Teachers and students get special pricing at the Adobe Education Store. You can also buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium - Complete CS4 Bundle
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software is the designer's dream toolkit for print, web, and mobile publishing. Creativity is rarely confined to one medium, so put your vector illustrations in motion, moving fluidly between Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. And use Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended to design and slice a web page for publishing with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium combines essential tools for producing everything from professional page layouts to rich interactive experiences in a unified, intuitive environment. Also includes Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe InDesign CS4, plus Adobe Fireworks CS4.
Buy now or download the free trial at the Adobe USA Store, or buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Fireworks Beta
The Fireworks beta is an opportunity for web designers, web architects, and developers to participate in a prerelease program. This program provides you with early access to our next release so that you can kick the tires and ensure that it meets your needs. Download the prerelease of the next version of Fireworks now and send in your feedback. The Fireworks beta will expire soon after the next version of Fireworks is available for purchase. New features in the next version of Fireworks include:
New user interface
Switch from Adobe Photoshop®, Illustrator®, and Flash — with the ease and familiarity of universal user interface design.
CSS and Images Export
Design complete web pages in Fireworks’ robust graphic environment, and then export web standards–compliant, CSS-based layouts, complete with external style sheets in one step.
PDF export
Generate high-fidelity, interactive, secure PDF documents from your Fireworks design comps for enhanced client communication.
Live Style improvements
Now when you update a style, all the elements the style has been applied to are instantly updated. Individual instances can break away from the style with a click of the Properties panel icon.
Adobe type engine
Produce superior type designs with the enhanced typesetting capabilities of Adobe Type Engine, familiar to users of Photoshop and Illustrator and now available in Fireworks. Import or copy and paste double-byte characters from Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop without loss of fidelity. Float text inside a path for high impact text logos.
AIR authoring
Create your AIR interactive prototype directly within Fireworks, ready to be deployed to HTML and CSS, Flex, or Flash.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom In A Book
This thorough guide to Adobe Illustrator CS3, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book is ideal for beginning users who want to master the key features of Adobe's powerful vector drawing software. Using clear, step-by-step lessons, each chapter contains a project that builds upon the reader's growing knowledge of the software, while review questions at the end of each chapter reinforce key concepts and skills.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book will get you up to speed. Adobe Illustrator CS3 is jam-packed with new features and enhancements, including Live Color, a new environment that enables users to explore, apply, and save custom color configurations; improved integration with Adobe Flash CS3, which ensures that your vector illustrations import effortlessly to Flash with their anchor point positions, layers, and paths intact; a new Eraser tool, which lets users quickly modify objects or create entirely new shapes; a new Crop Area tool, which lets users set up a workspace so that it's automatically primed for the type of media that will display their design, whether it's print, Web, video, or film; new document profiles, newly improved drawing tools and controls, and much more.
Whether you're brand-new to Adobe Illustrator or are looking for a project-based tutorial to familiarize yourself with Illustrator CS3's new features, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book provides you with the key techniques and tips you need to get the most out of this software.
SiteGrinder 2 — Photoshop Plugin Review
Review by Jennifer Apple
There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.
Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.
Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder 2 seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder 2, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.
So how does it work? Think for a second about the normal flow of work for any web design project. You'll spend a great deal of your time designing the visual appearance of your website in Photoshop, only to turn around and spend even more time working with a code editor like Dreamweaver or GoLive, going through the labor-intensive process of reconstructing these designs for the web.
Not to mention that fact that your creativity is often significantly limited when you're using a design program that's completely separate from the program that's used to prep everything for the web. Not everything that you design will be functional when it's translated to the web, nor will it be compatible with all web browsers period! As such, you'll often find yourself not going that extra creative mile just because you know that your web developer will have to re-work your designs just to make sure that they can be used online.
Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
SiteGrinder 2 throws all these considerations to the wind. By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.
With SiteGrinder 2, you can easily convert Photoshop Type layers into CSS styled web text. Virtually all of Photoshop's character and paragraph styles are supported by CSS, so you'll be able to ensure a smooth transition from workspace to web browser. This includes everything from bold and italic to paragraph spacing and alignment. Even hyperlinking is made easy, as SiteGrinder 2 will automatically turn any HTTP and e-mail URLs into hyperlinks.
Create Buttons, Rollovers, Popups & Menus
Likewise, SiteGrinder 2 will convert image layers to web graphics, generating automatically the HTML needed to display your images on your website exactly where you had positioned them in Photoshop. All the basic elements of any standard website are also easy to achieve by using SiteGrinder 2 with Photoshop, which allows you to create buttons, rollovers, pop-ups and menus. Pretty much all you have to do is tell SiteGrinder 2 about special layers by including 'hints' when you name the layers – simply include 'button', 'rollover' or 'pop-up' in your layer name and SiteGrinder 2 will create your preferred interactive feature automatically.
No Tables Here — SiteGrinder Produces Valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS
It's also a breeze to create a multipage website from a single Photoshop document, by using a Photoshop tool called the Layer Comps palette. Often overlooked, this incredibly powerful little tool lets you save and name particular document states, including the position and visibility of every layer. To create multiple pages, all you have to do is make the document look the way that you want a page on your site to look, and then make a layer comp — then set up the next page and make another layer comp, and so on. SiteGrinder 2 will then use these comps to figure out what to include on the web pages that it will generate for you. It's as easy as that!
SiteGrinder 2 effectively functions as your very own web technician, who knows all there is to know about CSS, HTML and other complex web formats.
You don't need to spend precious time and money learning the intricacies of web-speak when SiteGrinder 2 can do all this work for you, leaving you with much more time and freedom to explore the limits of your creative potential in the Photoshop world you know so well.
Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder 2 can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - PhotoshopCAFE Video Training
Even if you have no prior experience, Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration by Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE.com fame will teach you what you need to know to create websites that will blow the competition out of the water.
Based on the book Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration, this 2 1/2 hour DVD ROM shows you how to plan, design and launch your website.
Combining the 2 most popular web design tools, Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, you’ll learn the workflow that the pros use. In a simple step-by-step, plain English approach, Colin will show you exactly what you need to know. This one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional web sites.
• Set Photoshop preferences
• Create eye candy
• Use repeating patterns
• Make a final design comp
• Create roll-over effects
• Optimize gif, jpg and png
• Define a site in Dreamweaver
• Convert Photoshop designs to HTML
• Understand and use CSS
• Use Dreamweaver templates
• Embed Flash in Dreamweaver
• Improve Search Engine ranking
• Create remote rollovers
• Add Drop-down menus
• And more...
The simple-to-use interface lets you jump to any lesson with complete control over the playback. All the lesson files are included, so you can easily follow along.
About Colin Smith
An award winning designer, best-selling author and trainer, Colin is founder of one of the world's most popular Photoshop resource sites, PhotoshopCAFE.com. Colin is also a regular columnist for Advanced Photoshop, Computer Arts, and Photoshop User Magazine.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - Special Discount Price
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - $44.99 - (DVD version)
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration Download - $44.99 - (instant download)
Buy. Download. Create. Get Illustrator CS4 now at the Adobe Store.
Get Dreamweaver, Flash, Photoshop Extended with Adobe Web Premium CS4.
Try before you buy. Download any Adobe product for a free 30 day trial.
Adobe Illustrator Cs4 Crack
Adobe Illustrator Cs4 Portable
Adobe Illustrator CS4 - Free Trial Download - 30 Day Free Trial
The Adobe Illustrator CS4 Free Trial is not available yet, but you can download the Fireworks CS4 Beta, or the Illustrator CS3 Free Trial. Read our Top Reasons To Upgrade To Adobe Illustrator CS4 - New Features List below.
Free Illustrator CS4 Videos From lynda.com
We have 2 great free Illustrator CS4 video tutorials for you from lynda.com. Both of these are high quality videos that will show you some of the amazing new features in Adobe Illustrator CS4.
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Multiple Artboards
Mordy Golding walks through one the most anticipated new features in Illustrator CS4, multiple artboards. With multiple artboards, you can keep related, but separate and even differently sized artwork together in a single document. Mordy shows you how to create a document with multiple artboards from scratch, how to add, edit, and delete artboards within the document’s canvas using the new Artboard tool, and some handy shortcuts for navigating an Illustrator document with multiple artboards.
Watch the Multiple Artboards - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Enhanced Clipping Masks
Mordy Golding examines the new clipping mask behavior in Illustrator CS4. The new un-selectable state of the clipping mask makes it easier to work with your transformed artwork. Review how to create a mask from scratch and then learn how you can also modify the mask in the new Isolation Mode.
Watch the Enhanced CLipping Masks - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Adobe Illustrator CS4 Tutorials
On our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page you can find links to free Illustrator CS4 tutorials, Illustrator CS4 video tutorials, and Illustrator CS4 tips and tricks.
Top Reasons To Upgrade To Adobe Illustrator CS4 - New Features List
Transparency in gradients
Define the opacity of any individual color stop in a gradient. Reveal underlying objects and images, and create rich color and texture mixes using multiple layers, knockouts, and cover-up fades.
Blob Brush tool
Sketch with a brush that generates a single clean vector shape, even when strokes overlap. Draw naturally, using the Blob Brush tool together with the Eraser and Smooth tools.
Gradients exposed
Interact with gradients right on your object. Set gradient angle, position, and elliptical dimensions. Add and edit colors using sliders--all with immediate feedback where you work.
Multiple artboards
Create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes and display them any way you want--overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Save, export, and print artboards independently or together. Save a selected range or all artboards as a multipage PDF file.
Integration and delivery
Collaborate with your team, work across products, and deliver almost anywhere thanks to integrated tools and extensive format support. Confidently design for print, interactive experiences, motion effects, and more.
Enhanced user experience
Stay in the creative groove thanks to interface improvements that include on-object controls. Interact with tools smoothly, and increase your efficiency using new timesaving features and shortcuts.
In-panel appearance editing
Edit object characteristics directly in the Appearance panel, eliminating the need to open fill, stroke, or effects panels. Work with shared attributes and control display for faster rendering.
Refined graphic styles
Combine styles for unique effects and increased efficiency, and apply styles without disturbing an object's existing appearance. Enjoy new thumbnail previews and an expanded library of prebuilt styles.
Clipping masks demystified
Work with masks more easily by viewing only the clipped area of your objects during editing. Take advantage of Isolation Mode, and use Edit Clipping Path for even more control.
Separations Preview
Avoid color output surprises such as unexpected spot colors, unwanted overprinting, overprints that don't overprint, white overprinting, and CMYK blacks in text and placed files.
Adobe Illustrator CS4 & CS4 Design Premium- Best Deals From Adobe
Design quickly and confidently with Adobe Illustrator CS4 software. Sophisticated tools for drawing and typography, along with advanced color controls and creative effects, provide a comprehensive vector graphics environment.
Explore more efficient ways of working with multiple artboards, a Blob Brush tool for intuitive vector painting, and transparency in gradients with on-object controls. Stay ahead of the pace of change — equip yourself with precisely the tools you need for today’s print, web, interactive, motion, and mobile content design.
You can design with multiple artboards and create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes. Display the artboards any way you want — overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Learn more on our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page. To download the free trial, see details on our Illustrator CS4 Free Trial Download Page.
Find upgrade options and package deals at the Adobe USA Store. Teachers and students get special pricing at the Adobe Education Store. You can also buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium - Complete CS4 Bundle
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software is the designer's dream toolkit for print, web, and mobile publishing. Creativity is rarely confined to one medium, so put your vector illustrations in motion, moving fluidly between Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. And use Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended to design and slice a web page for publishing with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium combines essential tools for producing everything from professional page layouts to rich interactive experiences in a unified, intuitive environment. Also includes Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe InDesign CS4, plus Adobe Fireworks CS4.
Buy now or download the free trial at the Adobe USA Store, or buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Fireworks Beta
The Fireworks beta is an opportunity for web designers, web architects, and developers to participate in a prerelease program. This program provides you with early access to our next release so that you can kick the tires and ensure that it meets your needs. Download the prerelease of the next version of Fireworks now and send in your feedback. The Fireworks beta will expire soon after the next version of Fireworks is available for purchase. New features in the next version of Fireworks include:
New user interface
Switch from Adobe Photoshop®, Illustrator®, and Flash — with the ease and familiarity of universal user interface design.
CSS and Images Export
Design complete web pages in Fireworks’ robust graphic environment, and then export web standards–compliant, CSS-based layouts, complete with external style sheets in one step.
PDF export
Generate high-fidelity, interactive, secure PDF documents from your Fireworks design comps for enhanced client communication.
Live Style improvements
Now when you update a style, all the elements the style has been applied to are instantly updated. Individual instances can break away from the style with a click of the Properties panel icon.
Adobe type engine
Produce superior type designs with the enhanced typesetting capabilities of Adobe Type Engine, familiar to users of Photoshop and Illustrator and now available in Fireworks. Import or copy and paste double-byte characters from Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop without loss of fidelity. Float text inside a path for high impact text logos.
AIR authoring
Create your AIR interactive prototype directly within Fireworks, ready to be deployed to HTML and CSS, Flex, or Flash.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom In A Book
This thorough guide to Adobe Illustrator CS3, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book is ideal for beginning users who want to master the key features of Adobe's powerful vector drawing software. Using clear, step-by-step lessons, each chapter contains a project that builds upon the reader's growing knowledge of the software, while review questions at the end of each chapter reinforce key concepts and skills.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book will get you up to speed. Adobe Illustrator CS3 is jam-packed with new features and enhancements, including Live Color, a new environment that enables users to explore, apply, and save custom color configurations; improved integration with Adobe Flash CS3, which ensures that your vector illustrations import effortlessly to Flash with their anchor point positions, layers, and paths intact; a new Eraser tool, which lets users quickly modify objects or create entirely new shapes; a new Crop Area tool, which lets users set up a workspace so that it's automatically primed for the type of media that will display their design, whether it's print, Web, video, or film; new document profiles, newly improved drawing tools and controls, and much more.
Whether you're brand-new to Adobe Illustrator or are looking for a project-based tutorial to familiarize yourself with Illustrator CS3's new features, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book provides you with the key techniques and tips you need to get the most out of this software.
SiteGrinder 2 — Photoshop Plugin Review
Review by Jennifer Apple
There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.
Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.
Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder 2 seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder 2, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.
So how does it work? Think for a second about the normal flow of work for any web design project. You'll spend a great deal of your time designing the visual appearance of your website in Photoshop, only to turn around and spend even more time working with a code editor like Dreamweaver or GoLive, going through the labor-intensive process of reconstructing these designs for the web.
Not to mention that fact that your creativity is often significantly limited when you're using a design program that's completely separate from the program that's used to prep everything for the web. Not everything that you design will be functional when it's translated to the web, nor will it be compatible with all web browsers period! As such, you'll often find yourself not going that extra creative mile just because you know that your web developer will have to re-work your designs just to make sure that they can be used online.
Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
SiteGrinder 2 throws all these considerations to the wind. By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.
With SiteGrinder 2, you can easily convert Photoshop Type layers into CSS styled web text. Virtually all of Photoshop's character and paragraph styles are supported by CSS, so you'll be able to ensure a smooth transition from workspace to web browser. This includes everything from bold and italic to paragraph spacing and alignment. Even hyperlinking is made easy, as SiteGrinder 2 will automatically turn any HTTP and e-mail URLs into hyperlinks.
Create Buttons, Rollovers, Popups & Menus
Likewise, SiteGrinder 2 will convert image layers to web graphics, generating automatically the HTML needed to display your images on your website exactly where you had positioned them in Photoshop. All the basic elements of any standard website are also easy to achieve by using SiteGrinder 2 with Photoshop, which allows you to create buttons, rollovers, pop-ups and menus. Pretty much all you have to do is tell SiteGrinder 2 about special layers by including 'hints' when you name the layers – simply include 'button', 'rollover' or 'pop-up' in your layer name and SiteGrinder 2 will create your preferred interactive feature automatically.
No Tables Here — SiteGrinder Produces Valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS
It's also a breeze to create a multipage website from a single Photoshop document, by using a Photoshop tool called the Layer Comps palette. Often overlooked, this incredibly powerful little tool lets you save and name particular document states, including the position and visibility of every layer. To create multiple pages, all you have to do is make the document look the way that you want a page on your site to look, and then make a layer comp — then set up the next page and make another layer comp, and so on. SiteGrinder 2 will then use these comps to figure out what to include on the web pages that it will generate for you. It's as easy as that!
SiteGrinder 2 effectively functions as your very own web technician, who knows all there is to know about CSS, HTML and other complex web formats.
You don't need to spend precious time and money learning the intricacies of web-speak when SiteGrinder 2 can do all this work for you, leaving you with much more time and freedom to explore the limits of your creative potential in the Photoshop world you know so well.
Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder 2 can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - PhotoshopCAFE Video Training
Even if you have no prior experience, Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration by Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE.com fame will teach you what you need to know to create websites that will blow the competition out of the water.
Based on the book Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration, this 2 1/2 hour DVD ROM shows you how to plan, design and launch your website.
Combining the 2 most popular web design tools, Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, you’ll learn the workflow that the pros use. In a simple step-by-step, plain English approach, Colin will show you exactly what you need to know. This one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional web sites.
• Set Photoshop preferences
• Create eye candy
• Use repeating patterns
• Make a final design comp
• Create roll-over effects
• Optimize gif, jpg and png
• Define a site in Dreamweaver
• Convert Photoshop designs to HTML
• Understand and use CSS
• Use Dreamweaver templates
• Embed Flash in Dreamweaver
• Improve Search Engine ranking
• Create remote rollovers
• Add Drop-down menus
• And more...
The simple-to-use interface lets you jump to any lesson with complete control over the playback. All the lesson files are included, so you can easily follow along.
About Colin Smith
An award winning designer, best-selling author and trainer, Colin is founder of one of the world's most popular Photoshop resource sites, PhotoshopCAFE.com. Colin is also a regular columnist for Advanced Photoshop, Computer Arts, and Photoshop User Magazine.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - Special Discount Price
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - $44.99 - (DVD version)
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration Download - $44.99 - (instant download)
The Adobe Illustrator CS4 Free Trial is not available yet, but you can download the Fireworks CS4 Beta, or the Illustrator CS3 Free Trial. Read our Top Reasons To Upgrade To Adobe Illustrator CS4 - New Features List below.
Free Illustrator CS4 Videos From lynda.com
We have 2 great free Illustrator CS4 video tutorials for you from lynda.com. Both of these are high quality videos that will show you some of the amazing new features in Adobe Illustrator CS4.
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Multiple Artboards
Mordy Golding walks through one the most anticipated new features in Illustrator CS4, multiple artboards. With multiple artboards, you can keep related, but separate and even differently sized artwork together in a single document. Mordy shows you how to create a document with multiple artboards from scratch, how to add, edit, and delete artboards within the document’s canvas using the new Artboard tool, and some handy shortcuts for navigating an Illustrator document with multiple artboards.
Watch the Multiple Artboards - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Free Illustrator CS4 Video - Enhanced Clipping Masks
Mordy Golding examines the new clipping mask behavior in Illustrator CS4. The new un-selectable state of the clipping mask makes it easier to work with your transformed artwork. Review how to create a mask from scratch and then learn how you can also modify the mask in the new Isolation Mode.
Watch the Enhanced CLipping Masks - Illustrator CS4 Video (link opens a new window)
Adobe Illustrator CS4 Tutorials
On our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page you can find links to free Illustrator CS4 tutorials, Illustrator CS4 video tutorials, and Illustrator CS4 tips and tricks.
Top Reasons To Upgrade To Adobe Illustrator CS4 - New Features List
Transparency in gradients
Define the opacity of any individual color stop in a gradient. Reveal underlying objects and images, and create rich color and texture mixes using multiple layers, knockouts, and cover-up fades.
Blob Brush tool
Sketch with a brush that generates a single clean vector shape, even when strokes overlap. Draw naturally, using the Blob Brush tool together with the Eraser and Smooth tools.
Gradients exposed
Interact with gradients right on your object. Set gradient angle, position, and elliptical dimensions. Add and edit colors using sliders--all with immediate feedback where you work.
Multiple artboards
Create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes and display them any way you want--overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Save, export, and print artboards independently or together. Save a selected range or all artboards as a multipage PDF file.
Integration and delivery
Collaborate with your team, work across products, and deliver almost anywhere thanks to integrated tools and extensive format support. Confidently design for print, interactive experiences, motion effects, and more.
Enhanced user experience
Stay in the creative groove thanks to interface improvements that include on-object controls. Interact with tools smoothly, and increase your efficiency using new timesaving features and shortcuts.
In-panel appearance editing
Edit object characteristics directly in the Appearance panel, eliminating the need to open fill, stroke, or effects panels. Work with shared attributes and control display for faster rendering.
Refined graphic styles
Combine styles for unique effects and increased efficiency, and apply styles without disturbing an object's existing appearance. Enjoy new thumbnail previews and an expanded library of prebuilt styles.
Clipping masks demystified
Work with masks more easily by viewing only the clipped area of your objects during editing. Take advantage of Isolation Mode, and use Edit Clipping Path for even more control.
Separations Preview
Avoid color output surprises such as unexpected spot colors, unwanted overprinting, overprints that don't overprint, white overprinting, and CMYK blacks in text and placed files.
Adobe Illustrator CS4 & CS4 Design Premium- Best Deals From Adobe
Design quickly and confidently with Adobe Illustrator CS4 software. Sophisticated tools for drawing and typography, along with advanced color controls and creative effects, provide a comprehensive vector graphics environment.
Explore more efficient ways of working with multiple artboards, a Blob Brush tool for intuitive vector painting, and transparency in gradients with on-object controls. Stay ahead of the pace of change — equip yourself with precisely the tools you need for today’s print, web, interactive, motion, and mobile content design.
You can design with multiple artboards and create files containing up to 100 artboards of varying sizes. Display the artboards any way you want — overlapping, side by side, or stacked. Learn more on our Illustrator CS4 Tutorials Page. To download the free trial, see details on our Illustrator CS4 Free Trial Download Page.
Find upgrade options and package deals at the Adobe USA Store. Teachers and students get special pricing at the Adobe Education Store. You can also buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium - Complete CS4 Bundle
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium software is the designer's dream toolkit for print, web, and mobile publishing. Creativity is rarely confined to one medium, so put your vector illustrations in motion, moving fluidly between Adobe Illustrator CS4 and Adobe Flash CS4 Professional. And use Adobe Photoshop CS4 Extended to design and slice a web page for publishing with Adobe Dreamweaver CS4.
Adobe Creative Suite 4 Design Premium combines essential tools for producing everything from professional page layouts to rich interactive experiences in a unified, intuitive environment. Also includes Adobe Acrobat 9 Pro, Adobe InDesign CS4, plus Adobe Fireworks CS4.
Buy now or download the free trial at the Adobe USA Store, or buy in your country currency and language at the following Adobe International Stores:
Adobe United Kingdom | Adobe Germany | Adobe France | Adobe Eastern Europe
Fireworks Beta
The Fireworks beta is an opportunity for web designers, web architects, and developers to participate in a prerelease program. This program provides you with early access to our next release so that you can kick the tires and ensure that it meets your needs. Download the prerelease of the next version of Fireworks now and send in your feedback. The Fireworks beta will expire soon after the next version of Fireworks is available for purchase. New features in the next version of Fireworks include:
New user interface
Switch from Adobe Photoshop®, Illustrator®, and Flash — with the ease and familiarity of universal user interface design.
CSS and Images Export
Design complete web pages in Fireworks’ robust graphic environment, and then export web standards–compliant, CSS-based layouts, complete with external style sheets in one step.
PDF export
Generate high-fidelity, interactive, secure PDF documents from your Fireworks design comps for enhanced client communication.
Live Style improvements
Now when you update a style, all the elements the style has been applied to are instantly updated. Individual instances can break away from the style with a click of the Properties panel icon.
Adobe type engine
Produce superior type designs with the enhanced typesetting capabilities of Adobe Type Engine, familiar to users of Photoshop and Illustrator and now available in Fireworks. Import or copy and paste double-byte characters from Adobe Illustrator or Photoshop without loss of fidelity. Float text inside a path for high impact text logos.
AIR authoring
Create your AIR interactive prototype directly within Fireworks, ready to be deployed to HTML and CSS, Flex, or Flash.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom In A Book
This thorough guide to Adobe Illustrator CS3, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book is ideal for beginning users who want to master the key features of Adobe's powerful vector drawing software. Using clear, step-by-step lessons, each chapter contains a project that builds upon the reader's growing knowledge of the software, while review questions at the end of each chapter reinforce key concepts and skills.
Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book will get you up to speed. Adobe Illustrator CS3 is jam-packed with new features and enhancements, including Live Color, a new environment that enables users to explore, apply, and save custom color configurations; improved integration with Adobe Flash CS3, which ensures that your vector illustrations import effortlessly to Flash with their anchor point positions, layers, and paths intact; a new Eraser tool, which lets users quickly modify objects or create entirely new shapes; a new Crop Area tool, which lets users set up a workspace so that it's automatically primed for the type of media that will display their design, whether it's print, Web, video, or film; new document profiles, newly improved drawing tools and controls, and much more.
Whether you're brand-new to Adobe Illustrator or are looking for a project-based tutorial to familiarize yourself with Illustrator CS3's new features, Adobe Illustrator CS3 Classroom in a Book provides you with the key techniques and tips you need to get the most out of this software.
SiteGrinder 2 — Photoshop Plugin Review
Review by Jennifer Apple
There often seems to be a strict division of labor within the world of web design and development. Creative professionals tend to stick to the Photoshop domain, while those well-versed in scripting are left to the task of implementing their work. Indeed, the two realms are quite different from each other, to which any of us even vaguely familiar with either can easily attest.
Essentially, Photoshop is a no-holds-barred design studio, offering the artist a seemingly endless array of creative options. On the other hand, HTML, CSS, Java and the like follow strict rules of engagement, requiring the developer to take any number of esoteric concerns into consideration in order to ensure that designs are properly displayed on the web.
Turn Photoshop Into A Complete Web Design Tool
SiteGrinder 2 seeks to bridge this gap between design and development. Basically, this program turns Photoshop into an easy-to-use and fully functional web design tool. With SiteGrinder 2, designers will now have the freedom to totally let their creativity loose and then, without skipping a beat, transfer their designs to the web. Bringing esthetic concerns together with more practical considerations, this program is an amazingly powerful tool that would make a fantastic addition to any web designer's bag of tricks.
So how does it work? Think for a second about the normal flow of work for any web design project. You'll spend a great deal of your time designing the visual appearance of your website in Photoshop, only to turn around and spend even more time working with a code editor like Dreamweaver or GoLive, going through the labor-intensive process of reconstructing these designs for the web.
Not to mention that fact that your creativity is often significantly limited when you're using a design program that's completely separate from the program that's used to prep everything for the web. Not everything that you design will be functional when it's translated to the web, nor will it be compatible with all web browsers period! As such, you'll often find yourself not going that extra creative mile just because you know that your web developer will have to re-work your designs just to make sure that they can be used online.
Generate Your Web Pages Directly From Photoshop
SiteGrinder 2 throws all these considerations to the wind. By generating web pages directly from Photoshop, you'll be able to spend much more time on the creative end of the spectrum, since you'll know right off the bat how well particular designs will translate to the web. No more going back to the Photoshop drawing board after getting a phone call from your development team, telling you that what you had envisioned doesn't have a chance of being displayed on the web. You can immediately visually and interactively test your designs, which permits you to then make changes to either esthetics or functions while it's still relatively early on in the design process.
With SiteGrinder 2, you can easily convert Photoshop Type layers into CSS styled web text. Virtually all of Photoshop's character and paragraph styles are supported by CSS, so you'll be able to ensure a smooth transition from workspace to web browser. This includes everything from bold and italic to paragraph spacing and alignment. Even hyperlinking is made easy, as SiteGrinder 2 will automatically turn any HTTP and e-mail URLs into hyperlinks.
Create Buttons, Rollovers, Popups & Menus
Likewise, SiteGrinder 2 will convert image layers to web graphics, generating automatically the HTML needed to display your images on your website exactly where you had positioned them in Photoshop. All the basic elements of any standard website are also easy to achieve by using SiteGrinder 2 with Photoshop, which allows you to create buttons, rollovers, pop-ups and menus. Pretty much all you have to do is tell SiteGrinder 2 about special layers by including 'hints' when you name the layers – simply include 'button', 'rollover' or 'pop-up' in your layer name and SiteGrinder 2 will create your preferred interactive feature automatically.
No Tables Here — SiteGrinder Produces Valid XHTML 1.1 and CSS
It's also a breeze to create a multipage website from a single Photoshop document, by using a Photoshop tool called the Layer Comps palette. Often overlooked, this incredibly powerful little tool lets you save and name particular document states, including the position and visibility of every layer. To create multiple pages, all you have to do is make the document look the way that you want a page on your site to look, and then make a layer comp — then set up the next page and make another layer comp, and so on. SiteGrinder 2 will then use these comps to figure out what to include on the web pages that it will generate for you. It's as easy as that!
SiteGrinder 2 effectively functions as your very own web technician, who knows all there is to know about CSS, HTML and other complex web formats.
You don't need to spend precious time and money learning the intricacies of web-speak when SiteGrinder 2 can do all this work for you, leaving you with much more time and freedom to explore the limits of your creative potential in the Photoshop world you know so well.
Pricing and Availability
Mac OS X and Windows versions of the SiteGrinder unlockable demo are available now via download. SiteGrinder 2 can be ordered from Media Lab's online store.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - PhotoshopCAFE Video Training
Even if you have no prior experience, Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration by Colin Smith of PhotoshopCAFE.com fame will teach you what you need to know to create websites that will blow the competition out of the water.
Based on the book Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration, this 2 1/2 hour DVD ROM shows you how to plan, design and launch your website.
Combining the 2 most popular web design tools, Adobe Photoshop and Dreamweaver, you’ll learn the workflow that the pros use. In a simple step-by-step, plain English approach, Colin will show you exactly what you need to know. This one-of-a-kind guide will show you how to create visually appealing and technically effective professional web sites.
• Set Photoshop preferences
• Create eye candy
• Use repeating patterns
• Make a final design comp
• Create roll-over effects
• Optimize gif, jpg and png
• Define a site in Dreamweaver
• Convert Photoshop designs to HTML
• Understand and use CSS
• Use Dreamweaver templates
• Embed Flash in Dreamweaver
• Improve Search Engine ranking
• Create remote rollovers
• Add Drop-down menus
• And more...
The simple-to-use interface lets you jump to any lesson with complete control over the playback. All the lesson files are included, so you can easily follow along.
About Colin Smith
An award winning designer, best-selling author and trainer, Colin is founder of one of the world's most popular Photoshop resource sites, PhotoshopCAFE.com. Colin is also a regular columnist for Advanced Photoshop, Computer Arts, and Photoshop User Magazine.
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - Special Discount Price
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration - $44.99 - (DVD version)
Photoshop and Dreamweaver Integration Download - $44.99 - (instant download)