The Crisis of Credit Visualized

Avid readers may remember this post where I showcased a very cool example of displaying complex information in a understandable way - a topic that I find fascinating. Today, a colleague forwarded the video below to me. It is another superb example of taking something that is very complex (the credit crisis) and using visual media to make it dynamic, interesting, and clear to anyone who might watch. It is particularly impressive that he was able to hold my attention for a full 11 minutes - which is a very long time given today's short attention spans. Rarely do I spend more than a few seconds on something like this. We have all become very good as scanning the internet and synthesizing information, so it is really cool when something is of a high enough quality that you want to watch it all the way through. And he used Adobe Flash, After Effects, and Illustrator to create this, so yeah Adobe!

Credit to Jonathan Jarvis, a student at the Art Center College of Design, for this excellent piece.


The Crisis of Credit Visualized from Jonathan Jarvis on Vimeo.

Adobe Creative Suite 4 Launch Event

Check out the launch event for Adobe Creative Suite 4. It's the biggest launch in the company's history and this broadcast shows many of the very cool new features in the CS4 products.

NFL.com Replay Re-Cutter

Adobe has been working with the NFL to create a Replay Re-Cutter built on our Premiere Express hosted service. The new site debuted this week and it is pretty cool.

Basically, you can easily cut together a custom highlight reel of your favorite team from this week's game or from several games throughout the season. You can choose which highlights you want to include, add pictures, graphics, transitions, and music. This service is built on the Flash platform, which the NFL and NBC are also using to stream Sunday night games on the web and give the viewer the choice of which camera angles to view and basically provide a custom viewing experience for the football fan.

Being a huge fan of the reigning Super Bowl Champion New York Giants, I cut together a quick highlight reel of our Week 2 thrashing of the St. Louis Rams. Check it out!

It's going to be brilliant!

For those of you who haven't heard (which is probably most of my readers), Adobe announced their intention to announce (don't ask - we're confused about it too) Creative Suite 4 on September 23rd. This is our flagship software - including favorites like Photoshop, Flash, Dreamweaver, Illustrator, and InDesign.

The main reason that I bring this up is because it has consumed my (and pretty much everyone at Adobe) work life for the last three months. And I just want to spread the word to make sure as many of you check out the products as possible - especially if you're in education. More details on what I've personally been doing in conjunction with the software will come on the 9/23 date.

But, for now, if you're interested in hearing more about CS4 (and trust me - there are a lot of really cool new features), you can sign up to view the webcast of the announcement on 9/23.

Adobe Education Leaders

Last week was the Adobe Education Leaders summer institute. We hosted about 75 educators from all over the United States, plus the UK, Germany, Austria, New Zealand, and Australia. These educators are a mix of K-12 teachers, administrators, technology coordinators, and e-learning specialists. But, they all love Adobe products and work to both spread the word about our products within the education community and help us better understand what the K-12 community needs in terms of educational technology solutions.

The AELs spent three full days hearing our plans for the coming year, learning about new products coming out, getting some professional development on how to use our products, and sharing what they have been doing in their classrooms and school districts. It was really neat to hear how these educators are using our products and it gave us lots of ideas of how to help them better and provided some overarching motivation for me. It's always nice to know that what you're doing is actually helpful to some people. 

During the week, we had a bunch of social events, including dinner at Medjool and a night on a dinner cruise around the San Francisco Bay (see the picture above).  

Days 1 and 2

Yesterday was my first day of work at my new job at Adobe. It was overwhelming to say the least, but very exciting at the same time. Today was much better and I expect tomorrow to be even better. I'm looking forward to the day when I am fully familiar with all the stuff that is going on in my business group and the intricate ways that Adobe works. 

I want to attempt to help you all understand what it is exactly that I do as the new Curriculum Manager within the Education Solutions/Marketing group. Basically, Adobe has all these amazing software titles - there are products that many of you are probably familiar with (Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, and Flash) and newer products that maybe you've never heard of (like Flex and Acrobat Connect). All of these have uses in the education sector - whether it is traditional creative professional education programs or educators wanting to expand their use of eLearning solutions or computer science students who are learning the latest in rich internet application development. My job is to produce the curriculum that shows educators how they can use our software in traditional classroom curriculum or how to technically use our software titles. I'm also going to be working on marketing the curriculum to help educators become more aware of what we have to offer as well as helping to get some professional development programs started. 

I hope this helps you understand a little better what I'll be doing and if not, sorry - it's only my second day and remember it's still a lot easier to understand than all that sciency stuff I did in DC.