I am SO excited to finally be able to talk about Muse,  the codename for Adobe’s website-building, programming-free software. I saw a presentation on it by Dani Beauchamp at the HOW Conference a couple of months ago, and was fortunate enough to get access to the software in advance.  Needless to say,  I’ve been dying for it to become public.

GO, GO, GO and check out that link if you haven’t yet. I won’t go into all of it since 1. it’s all there on their site, and 2. I will probably ramble on for a while. However, I do want to say that this is beyond game-changing for designers. We no longer need to be constrained by our own knowledge of code, or rely on back-end development.

This is what I’ve been hoping for. For a very long time. Adobe did good by us.

I noticed a link to Lytro on a facebook friend’s news feed, and have to share. It was also highlighted on ABC News recently. This company’s up and coming light field camera takes what they are calling living pictures.

You can read all of the details behind the science on Lytro’s site, but in a nutshell, this camera reads light like no other has before. As a result, it’s capable of capturing a picture that can be focused after. Yep, for real. You don’t even have to try and you will have sharp images every time. Also, it has no shutter lag!

It looks like the camera is only available for reservation at the moment.

With digital continuing to grow exponentially and become more robust, this could be a great tool for designers & marketers. For example, what a cool way to show a line of products, allowing the consumer to focus on each one for the details. Oh, the possibilities.

I’ve been meaning to mention that I’m a fan of this Living Social spot (and the other).Great art direction. Love the typography. Smart idea. I didn’t even realize that this campaign was called We’ll set the stage. You play the part. It’s too bad it wasn’t in the actual commercials. It could be a really nice tagline.

I have to admit I felt a little bit of a disconnect between the style in this campaign to the logo. I tried to do some research on the company’s brand identity. It doesn’t seem like there’s been much developed just yet. At least on the public end.

I’d love to take a crack at it.

A coworker of mine shared a magical link with me the other day:

wordmark

Check it out immediately. This online tool picks up all of the fonts installed on your system, and displays any word you choose set in those fonts. Now the notion in itself is not so new. You can preview any word of your choice in organization software such as Suitcase. However, wordmark shows all your options in one rolling page.

Well done.

I stumbled upon something wonderful today. Mozilla has developed an ongoing project called Firefox Live. It is a live feed of adorable red panda (firefox) babies, one of which is pictured below.

Of course, this isn’t the first streaming video of it’s kind. HOWEVER, way to go, Mozilla, for not only putting some context around it, but doing it for such a great cause. The site helps spread awareness of  endangered red pandas. Get all of the info and see the feed at firefoxlive.org.

Tens all around.

I walked past an ad at one of our bus stops, and the Millenium Park logo toward the bottom caught my eye. I didn’t even realize that Millenium Park had a logo. Is that bad?

Anyhow, I’ve been trying to research who is responsible for the design, to no avail. If anyone knows, please do share. Whoever it is, they did a great job. It’s clean, simple and symbolic with that “P” seeming to imitate a leaf.

If you’re curious about what Dolce Gusto actually is, you can find out here.

If you haven’t heard of the camera company’s new project, Your Second Shot, you have to check out this site.

This campaign promotes their HS System, which compensates for low-light conditions, and they are offering people a chance to recreate lost moments.

Brilliant.

We’ve all been there – using a stock image in a rush, renaming, and not having a clue where it came from a month later. Now there’s a solution to images you no longer have the numbers for. I received this link the other day and absolutely have to share it. Tineye is a site where you can upload your unknown stock images, and it will search for them. So cool.

I learned a great trick yesterday and wanted to pass along the info. I’ve always been annoyed that I couldn’t figure out how to take swatches from one .ai file to another, and couldn’t accept that the simplest way to do it was making little boxes of all of the swatches I was trying to pick up and pasting them into the new file. I dealt with it for a while, not really bothering to research it. I finally got fed up enough that I decided to figure it out, and after reading through Adobe’s online help resources, I found the answer. Needless to say, it was easy to find, easy to do, and I’m a little embarassed I didn’t know this before. But in my own defense, no one I asked knew of any other way than the copy/paste method. Anyhow, here goes.

Say you have an Illustrator document with a series of Pantone swatches like the sample below.

If you want to bring these swatches into another document, you can load your source file as an actual library. Go to your swatch menu and select Open Swatch Library > Other Library.

It will ask you to select a library, but you can simply select the Illustrator file you want to pull swatches from.

You’ll see a new swatch palette pop up that has all the swatches from the document you selected.

Piece of cake, right? And the great part is that palette will stay there so you can apply the swatches to as many files as you want without having to do this process every time.