On April 12th Adobe launched a new version of Adobe Software -  Adobe Creative Suite 5 (CS5).

To celebrate the launch of the new range of Adobe products and technologies, Bridge has sponsored an Adobe Launch Event that took place on April 10th in Kochi, India. It gave programmers and designers the chance to learn from the creators what’s new and to socialize and interact with other experts in the industry.

According to the variant the new software package CS5 contains all or some of the programs: Photoshop, Illustrator, InDesign, Acrobate, Flash, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Premiere, After Effects, Soundbooth, OnLoccation and Encore. Most improvements will be for Photoshop that celebrates it’s 20th birthday this year and also for Illustrator and InDesign.

Photoshop gets more intelligent

CS5 has more improvements for Photoshop than ever a version before. Image contents will be recognized better what enables difficult manipulations and retouching. In particular Adobe is proud of the function “Content Aware Fill” that makes it possible to remove any content from an image. This function even works when there is a high variation of colors and lights in the background. The extended version will even have some new tools to create and work on 3D graphics and 3D animations.

Moreover the new version of Photoshop offers a bunch of small improvements that were made according to user suggestions. For instance provides the tool to drop images now a raster in the golden ratio (for the image-composition the image will be separated horizontally and vertically in three parts by auxiliary lines) and images will be straighten automatically.

1. http://tehcpeng.net/

What I liked in this website is its stunning layout. It has a clean web 2.0 layout. Also the content area is very well done, but ofcource the feature that I disliked in this blog is that the main navigation lacks readability. And ofcource it is not good to put the search function in the footer in a blog. (I don’t want to type something to search there). It is not so user friendly.

2. http://digitalmash.com/journal/articles/dynamic-columns/

This site has a fresh and modern design. Compared to the previous, it has a really effective and simple navigation. But what I feel can be improvised improved is the typography. There are more blank spaces in the content area.

3. http://blog.cocoia.com/

This site also has a web 2.0 layout. Good Typography, easilily easily differentiated entries but again the search field at the footer does not give me a good impression.

4. http://www.koodoz.com.au/klog/

Here I must mention the design works perfect. Brilliant color combination which brings a fresh feel. Excellent typography, funny but effective navigation. Here the title and the logo failed to get attention.

These are just some comments on the basic design and the user friendliness of few blog sites which is taken randomly from different design magazines. Next I shall give you basic tips on how to improve the design with typography.

Cheers!!

Abdul Musavir is a designer at Bridge India. He gets his inspiration from searching good designs on the internet and will be sharing his most attractive findings regularly with you on the Bridge Blog.