Create The Web

Last night Adobe showed off some of the new things they’ve been working on in the form of a live streamed session from their Create The Web keynote in San Francisco.

Highlights of this for me was the work they are doing to progress CSS3 in the form of their CSS FilterLab, along with the evolution of tools I’m already using and love, such as Shadow, which has now joined the suite of ‘Edge’ tools and services.

These include Edge Animate (formerly just Edge), Edge Reflow, Edge Code (a distribution of the work done by the Brackets team), Edge Inspect (formerly Shadow), and Edge Web Fonts. Other announcements were made around TypeKit and PhoneGap Build.

Alongside the official release of Edge Inspect, Edge Reflow was another standout announcement for me. Responsive design principles are becoming ever more prevalent in industry requests and the solutions that we present back to clients, yet many current workflows and software options do not quite mesh with this. Clients may struggle to understand the concepts, or may be uneasy at agreeing to a solution where they have not seen every possible permutation of how their brand may be conveyed. Alternatively designers and user experience teams may be placed in a position where they are having to mock up or wireframe endless options for approval, when this still does not accurately match the realities of responsive design, which is that static visuals of any set widths do not appropriately convey the many factors which may impact on a design. Adobe are currently working on a tool that they hope will ease some of these pain points, in the form of Edge Reflow. Using assets from Photoshop, designers will be able to mock up responsive layouts in an editor which alters content to show different variations based on the width of the screen. Whilst not a miracle solution to all of the problems around today, I for one welcome Adobe and anyone else putting fresh thinking into approaching how best to manage ever evolving workflows, and look forward to seeing the final product release.

For a full overview of everything announced yesterday please seehttp://html.adobe.com/.

Exciting news!

Part of the reason why I was so excited by the keynote yesterday was that I’m very pleased to say that I will be speaking at the London leg of the Create the Web tour, on October 2nd 2012.

My session is intended as an introductory session on HTML5, primarily aimed at designers, and is described as follows:

An introduction to the modern Web for the creative professional

Sally Jenkinson (Head of Technology, Lightmaker UK)

HTML5 and CSS3 introduce exciting new features that expand the creative capabilities of the web. In this session you will get an introduction to some of the newest and most expressive features in HTML5 and CSS3, as well as seeing how these features are currently being used by the industry to create engaging experiences.

For more information please see http://createtheweblondon.eventbrite.com/. Fortunately or unfortunately depending on whether you already have tickets the event is sold out, but it is possible to be added to a waiting list through the above link. For those of you who are intending to attend I look forward to seeing you there!