Design the icons you want

My third course on LinkedIn Learning has just been released: Creating Icons with Adobe Illustrator. And of course as the title suggests, this is all about learning how to create your own icons using Adobe Illustrator. This course provides an overview of what an icon is and its key characteristics, then teaches you how to design your own icons using Adobe Illustrator. Instructor Bart Van de Wiele explores why you need icons, how you use them, and why scalability is important. Bart steps you through how to set up your Illustrator document before you begin your design process. He describes how to organize your work using Illustrator artboards for arranging, naming, and exporting your icons. Bart walks you through ways to import your sketch into Illustrator, then goes over how to clean up your sketch digitally. He shows you how to use simple, complex, and compound shapes to build your logo digitally, then explores several more advanced techniques. In conclusion, Bart covers best practices for exporting your icons for the web, for print, and for use in other applications like Photoshop.

Fast and efficient icon creation from Creating Icons with Illustrator by Bart Van de Wiele

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I’m super happy to announce that I’m speaking at CreativePro Week early June. Well, virtually at least since this year CreativePro Week has become an online event due to the quarantine. And because of these changed circumstances you’ll be able to follow all of my sessions online and rewatch the recordings later (which might be very valuable to some). Of course this is not the same as being able to say hi to myself and other speakers in person. But at least no one will have to miss out on great content this year. Here’s a quick rundown of my sessions.

InDesign+Photoshop+Illustrator

Tuesday, June 2, 10:30 am – 11:30 am Central

It’s the ultimate Adobe power-trio: InDesign, Photoshop, and Illustrator! But you’ll never be efficient with any one of them if you don’t understand how they work with the others!

Topics include:

• Why layers are such a big deal
• How to properly set up Photoshop and Illustrator files for InDesign
• Choosing between layers and artboards
• CC Libraries: the secret back door conduit
• Best practices for managing vectors and pixels
• And much more!

Managing Your Assets with Libraries

Tuesday, June 2, 3:45 pm – 4:30 pm Central

Working smarter-not-harder is possible when you leverage features in InDesign like native libraries and Creative Cloud libraries. Both offer a way to save, organize, and share your brand assets. In this session, you’ll explore the differences between InDesign native libraries and Creative Cloud libraries, and see how you can significantly speed up your daily workflow and help you push through global updates over multiple programs and projects.

Topics will include:

• The difference between InDesign libraries and Creative Cloud libraries
• How to create and manage Creative Cloud libraries
• How to store your assets in online folders
• How to use the web portal to manage your assets
• How to share your libraries and collaborate with others
• Best practices when re-using assets in multiple Adobe applications

XD for presentations

Thursday, June 4, 3:30 pm – 4:30 pm Central

Adobe XD is changing the way many think about designing and prototyping for the web and mobile applications, but it’s also found an unexpected use case. With its blazing fast performance and intuitive features like Auto-Animate, more and more users are starting to craft their presentations completely using XD. In this session, Bart will share their tips and tricks for how to get the most out of Adobe XD for presentations, how to build incredible animations to tell your story (without having to use a complicated timeline interface), how to collaborate with others to build your presentation, and how to share and present your final masterpiece.

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Adobe MAX 2017

With around 11,000 registered attendees, this year’s Adobe MAX conference is the biggest ever. And with that also the largest creative event in the world. Special keynotes, new technology reveals, special guests, a few hundred breakout sessions and a great party, MAX has it all. Like the pilgrimage to Mecca, it’s my opinion that designers worldwide should visit Adobe MAX at least once in their lifetime.

This year I’ll be doing my InDesign Deep Dive lab session again, just like last year (though with updated materials). I was lucky enough to have been awarded with the highest overall presenter and session score for my session at MAX 2016. So I made sure to deliver a top quality session again this year. With 4 sessions of 100 attendees each sold out I’m hoping everyone is as excited as I am.

Other conferences

I’m also visiting and presenting at other conferences this year. Unfortunately not outside of Europe. As you may know by now I cover the Benelux region (Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxemburg) so the bulk of my activities always happen there. Though I really enjoyed the Making Design conference in Oslo last June, that was an amazing experience.

If you’re from the region you can still see me present

• The Dutch Design Week at Sint Lucas College in Eindhoven on 26 and 27th Oct.
• The Adobe Symposium in Amsterdam on 6th Nov.
• After MAX event in Antwerp on 9th Nov.
• UsbyNight in Antwerp on 23-24-25th Nov.

It’s been a while

Yes, I know. I haven’t updated this blog in a long time. And needless to say, I’ve been very busy, both professionally and in my personal life. But this year has brought so many exciting things and Adobe has really been producing a lot of new content like

• The frequent Adobe XD updates
• Team Projects for Adobe’s video apps
• The new Adobe Scan app
• Project Felix
• Really cool updates for Adobe Stock for Enterprise
• Adobe Sign improvements
• The strategic partnership between Microsoft and Adobe
• Very exciting updates to the video tools

… and of course the upcoming new features which will be launched during Adobe MAX in a few days. So stay tuned for those. In the mean time you can find me on LinkedIn and Twitter if you want to connect or have me as a speaker at your conference. Talk soon!

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What are we talking about?

Creative Cloud libraries were introduced in 2015 and quickly grew to be one of the best services that Creative Cloud has to offer. It’s a bridge from your CC storage and CC mobile apps to your main desktop applications. Use it to collect all the essential designer building blocks, including text styles, colors, vector shapes, layer styles and much more. This made it especially useful for collecting artwork for specific projects or clients. And such a feature just begs a user to start collaborating between colleagues, teams, external parties and clients.

Libraries stored in the Creative Cloud dashboard.

How to share libraries

About a week ago we had 2 ways of sharing libraries:

1. Share a link: Sharing a link did exactly that. Your CC library, safely stored behind your CC membership login and password, would become a public link that anyone can access. Opening up this link in a web browser would allow the viewer to inspect the contents of the library and, optionally, copy over the library into their own CC account. This is still a great way distribute to a set of graphics and other design objects to e.g. freelancers when accepting a project. At Adobe we even use this ourselves to share demo files with colleagues worldwide. Do keep in mind that the recipient copies the library into their own account. This means that there’s no live link to the original library thus the initiator’s library can never be altered by the recipients. And what if you make a mistake and mess up your copied library? Well, just do the same thing you do when downloading something from the internet: download a fresh copy. (Of course, under the condition that the link is still active).
2. Collaborate with others: When you choose to collaborate with others you’re sharing the same library with an individual or group of people. So this means you’re letting other people into your own library. In this scenario, up until a few days ago, anyone who had access to the library could also alter it. And of course this is always a double edged sword since someone can make a great addition to the library or keep it up to date. But someone else might also unexpectedly delete an item or change something that they shouldn’t, or even add content. Meaning there were scenarios where certain individuals required read-access but not write-access. For example imagine showcasing a mood board or other designs in a library to a client. You want them to look at the contents of the library, but not change anything. And that day has finally arrived.

How it works

Today, when you invite people to collaborate with you it’s up to the initiator (let’s call him “the librarian”) to decide which user has which rights. Choosing “can edit” will have the effect of a “normal” collaboration, just like before. But when choosing “can view” you’re limiting the recipient’s options to only viewing the content.

Also, keep these extra bullet points in mind for read-only users (as they exist at the time of this writing):

• Users can share the library as a public link with others, but also still with the limitation of being read-only.
• Users can’t change their own rights nor those of other collaborators.
• Users can unshare the library and leave the collaboration.
• Users can copy individual items to their own library folder and change them (only in their private environment since that other library isn’t shared with others).

If you want to learn more about collaboration using libraries check out this page.

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