Adobe held the Momentum in Print 2006 event in January. Gary Cosimini, Adobe Development Director, took the occasion to talk about the future of the Graphics Communication Workflow. But the word “workflow” can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. Cosimini therefore started his presentation by offering an overview of who is connected by workflow.
He started by pointing out that everyone is connected in the graphics workflow: editorial and layout, photography and video, advertising creative and production, prepress, multimedia and web (and mobile), DAM and archiving, and finally design and writing freelances. A workflow is a chain of events, or an organisation of steps one takes to arrive at a desired result.
Cosimini knows five different workflow methods. In a free form workflow you only have to know where the file is. In a waterfall approach, you will use a hierarchical folder structure, while the next step is to install a “watched” folder automation system. There also is a databased workflow in which routing and assignments are centrally managed. Pervasive connectivity has made distributed workflow the norm, said Cosimini.
The workflow has been redefined by technologies like DTP, Internet, PDF, digital photography, colour management, LCD proofing, inkjet proofing and digital printing, soft proofing, JDF, and of course Adobe’s own Creative Suite. Workflow before the Mac was a manual affair, with much back and forth going to proof read, retouch, and approve. In the third millennium, however, workflow is a matter of copy and paste, email, and comment and annotate inside Adobe Acrobat.
Cosimini drew the attention to the fact that this workflow is about to change once more. There’s a new generation—the Xbox generation—who has never seen a real black & white photograph, never owned a film camera, doesn’t read newspapers but gets most of its information online. Workflow will have to adapt to these new audiences, because that’s where the advertisers aim at. Consequently, the workflow of the future will include video, animation, rich interactivity, and will have to work on mobile devices.
From an Adobe point of view, this new desktop publishing workflow that lies at the horizon, has made the acquisition of Macromedia more or less a necessity. Cosimini of course won’t go that far in his comments. He just said it’s better for Adobe and Macromedia to be teaming up together, but the truth is that Adobe needed more applications to fulfil the need for Rich Internet Applications (RIA). Adobe could either develop these themselves, at the expense of huge costs whereas Macromedia already had (and has) those applications in house. The acquisition is therefore much better for Adobe, because it probably saved them money.
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Either way, they could now invest resources in developing Acrobat 3D, which is available only on the Windows platform, but which is an integral part of the new workflow as Cosimini explained it. The Macromedia part of the equation lies with Flash which is now combined with PDF to bring a more interactive dimension into Acrobat documents while your workflow can more or less stay unchanged. Unless you’re going to use Flex, which is the development environment for building RIA using Flash as the player. Flex allows web developers to build customer self-service web sites.
New Workflow Tools
Except for applications like Flex, Adobe has the tools placed in position to cope with the future workflow. InDesign Server is the first line of defence. It is a version of InDesign specifically adapted for background processing, without a user interface. It communicates through scripting and SOAP. It is available as part of workflow solutions offered by Adobe partners like SoftCare with K4, WoodWing with Smart Connection Enterprise, etc.
The specific features that make InDesign Server a tool for the new workflow are its capability to enable text entry from web browsers, background preview generation, and template-based self-service advertising and collateral manufacture. Printers, service providers and designers can log into the same system.
Lightroom is another such tool, according to Cosimini. It is workflow specifically aimed at digital photographers. It is for those dealing with hundreds of images on a daily basis. While some of us—myself included—wondered why Adobe developed Lightroom when the Bridge can already cope with images, Cosimini said it is different from Bridge because Lightroom is focused on the photo professional or advanced amateur, and not on a publishing workflow at large.
Lightroom will enable you to sort, enhance, present, and print Camera RAW files.
Finally, Acrobat 3D will serve a vertical workflow: that of CAD design.
With all of these tools in portfolio now, Adobe’s Cosimini believes the company is ready for the publishers and designers of content for the new generation of information consumers.
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